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ENGLISH TRAITS 

BEING VOLUME V. 

OF 

EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS 



ENGLISH TRAITS 



BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



Jfteto an* Kebtee* Titian 





BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 

@&e fttoerjji&e #re#& Camfcrtofle 

1883 



y* 



** 






Copyright, 1856 and 1876, 
Bz RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
Br EDWARD W. EMERSON, 

All rights reserved. 
2d. COPY 
SUPPLIED FROM 
COPYRIGHT FILES 

JANUARY, 1911. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. First Visit to England 7 

II. Voyage to England ..... 28 

III. Land . 37 

IV. Race . 47 

V. Ability 7a 

VI. Manners . 101 

VII. Truth 1U 

VIII. Character 124 



IX. Cockayne 



140 



X. Wealth 149 

XI. Aristocracy 166 

XII. Universities 191 

XIII. Religion 205 

XIV. Literature 221 

XV. The " Times," 247 

XVI. Stonehenge 259 

v XVII. Personal . 276 

XVIII. Result 283 

XIX. Speech at Manchester, ..... 292 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 



CHAPTER I. 

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 

I have been twice in England. In 1833, on 
my return from a short tour in Sicily, Italy and 
France, I crossed from Boulogne and landed in 
London at the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sun- 
day morning ; there were few people in the streets, 
and I remember the pleasure of that first walk on 
English ground, with my companion, an American 
artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and 
the Strand to a house in Russell Square, whither 
we had been recommended to good chambers. For 
the first time for many months we were forced to 
check the saucy habit of travellers' criticism, as we 
could no longer speak aloud in the streets without 
being understood. The shop-signs spoke our lan- 
guage ; our country names were on the door-plates, 
and the public and private buildings wore a more 
native and wonted front. 

Like most young men at that time, I was much 
indebted to the men of Edinburgh and of the Edin- 



8 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

burgh Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, 
and to Scott, Playfair and De Quincey; and my 
narrow and desultory reading had inspired the wish 
to see the faces of three or four writers, — Cole- 
ridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the 
latest and strongest contributor to the critical jour- 
nals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the 
reasons that led me to Europe, when I was ill and 
was advised to travel, it was mainly the attraction 
of these persons. If Goethe had been still living I 
might have wandered into Germany also. Besides 
those I have named (for Scott was dead), there 
was not in Britain the man living whom I cared to 
behold, unless it were the Duke of Wellington, 
whom I afterwards . saw at Westminster Abbey at 
the funeral of Wilberforce. The young scholar fan- 
cies it happiness enough to live with people who 
can give an inside to the world ; without reflecting 
that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, 
and cannot apply themselves to yours. The condi- 
tions of literary success are almost destructive of 
the best social power, as they do not leave that 
frolic liberty which only can encounter a compan- 
ion on the best terms. It is probable you left some 
obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with 
right mother-wit and equality to life, when you 
crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated 
scribes. I have, however, found writers superior 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 9 

to their books, and I cling to my first belief that a 
strong head will dispose fast enough of these im- 
pediments and give one the satisfaction of reality, 
the sense of having been met, and a larger hori- 
zon. 

On looking over the diary of my journey in 
1833, I find nothing to publish in my memoranda 
of visits to places. But I have copied the few notes 
I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties 
quite too good and too transparent to the whole 
world to make it needful to affect any prudery of 
suppression about a few hints of those bright per- 
sonalities. 

At Florence, chief among artists I found Hora- 
tio Greenough, the American scidptor. His face 
was so handsome and his person so well formed 
that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the 
face of his Medora and the figure of a colossal 
Achilles in clay, were idealizations of his own. 
Greenough was a superior man, ardent and elo- 
quent, and all his opinions had elevation and 
magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had 
wrought in schools or fraternities, — the genius of 
the master imparting his design to his friends and 
inflaming them with it, and when his strength was 
spent, a new hand with equal heat continued the 
work ; and so by relays, until it was finished in 
every part with equal fire. This was necessary in 



10 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

so refractory a material as stone ; and he thought 
art would never prosper until we left our shy jeal- 
ous ways and worked in society as they. All his 
thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was 
an accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of 
the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic art. His pa- 
per on Architecture, published in 1843, announced 
in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on 
the morality in architecture, notwithstanding the 
antagonism in their views of the history of art. I 
have a private letter from him, — later, but re- 
specting the same period, — in which he roughly 
sketches his own theory. " Here is my theory of 
structure : A scientific arrangement of spaces and 
forms to functions and to site ; an emphasis of fea- 
tures proportioned, to their gradated importance in 
function ; color and ornament to be decided and ar- 
ranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having 
a distinct reason for each decision ; the entire and 
immediate banishment of all make-shift and make- 
believe." 

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, 
an invitation from Mr. Landor, who lived at San 
Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th. May I dined 
with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courte- 
ous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Ghe- 
rardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful land- 
scape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 11 

from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean 
wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not know 
whether the imputation were just or not, but cer- 
tainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that 
haughty mind and he was the most patient and gen- 
tle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen 
which grows all about Florence ; he admired Wash- 
ington ; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, 
Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided 
in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well con- 
tent to impress, if possible, his English whim upon 
the immutable past. No great man ever had a 
great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an excep- 
tion ; and Philip he calls the greater man. In art, 
he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. 
He prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after 
that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here. 
He prefers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo ; in 
painting, Eaffaelle, and shares the growing taste 
for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek 
histories he thought the only good ; and after them, 
Voltaire's. I could not make him praise Mackin- 
tosh, nor my more recent friends ; Montaigne very 
cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed un- 
discriminating. He thought Degerando indebted 
to " Lucas on Happiness " and " Lucas on Holi- 
ness " ! He pestered me with Southey ; but who is 
Southey ? 



12 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Fri- 
day I did not fail to go, and this time with Green- 
ough. He entertained us at once with reciting half 
a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar's ! — from 
Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield 
more than was necessary, and undervalued Burke, 
and undervalued Socrates ; designated as three of 
the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion and Ti- 
moleon, — much as our pomologists, in their lists, 
select the three or the six best pears " for a small 
orchard ; — " and did not even omit to remark the 
similar termination of their names. " A great 
man," he said, " should make great sacrifices and 
kill his hundred oxen without knowing whether 
they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or 
whether the flies would eat them." I had visited 
Professor Amici, who had shown me his micro- 
scopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand di- 
ameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they 
were applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in 
the same breath, said, " the sublime was in a grain 
of dust." I suppose I teased him about recent 
writers, but he professed never to have heard of 
Herschel, not even by name. One room was full 
of pictures, which he likes to show, especially one 
piece, standing before which he said " he woidd 
give fifty guineas to the man that would swear it 
was a Domenichino." I was more curious to see 






FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 13 

his library, but Mr. H , one of the guests, told 

me that Mr. Lanclor gives away his books and has 
never more than a dozen at a time in his house. 

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak 
which the English delight to indulge, as if to sig- 
nalize their commanding freedom. He has a won- 
derful brain, despotic, violent and inexhaustible, 
meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to 
letters ; in which there is not a style nor a tint not 
known to him, yet with an English appetite for ac- 
tion and heroes. The thing done avails, and not 
what is said about it. An original sentence, a step 
forward, is worth more than all the censures. Lan- 
dor is strangely undervalued in England ; usually 
ignored and sometimes savagely attacked in the 
Reviews. The criticism may be right or wrong, 
and is quickly forgotten ; but year after year the 
scholar must still go back to Landor for a multi- 
tude of elegant sentences ; for wisdom, wit, and in- 
dignation that are unforgetable. 

From London, on the 5th August, I went to 
Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, re- 
questing leave to pay my respects to him. It was 
near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message 
that he was in bed, but if I would call after one 
o'clock he would see me. I returned at one, and 
he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright 



14 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning on his 
cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled 
his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I 
knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and 
doings when he knew him in Rome ; what a master 
of the Titianesque he was, &c, &c. He spoke of 
Dr. Charming. It was an unspeakable misfortune 
that he should have turned out a Unitarian af- 
ter all. On this, he burst into a declamation on 
the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, — its high 
unreasonableness ; and taking up Bishop Water- 
land's book, which lay on the table, he read with 
vehemence two or three pages written by himself in 
the fly-leaves, — passages, too, which, I believe, are 
printed in the " Aids to Reflection." When he 
stopped to take breath, I interposed that " whilst I 
highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to 
tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian." 
"Yes," he said, "I supposed so;" and continued as 
before. It was a wonder that after so many ages of 
unquestioning acquiescence in the doctrine of St. 
Paul, — the doctrine of the Trinity, which was also 
according to Philo Judaeus the doctrine of the Jews 
before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians should 
take on themselves to deny it, &c, &c. He was 
very sorry that Dr. Channing, a man to whom he 
looked up, — no, to say that he looked up to him 
would be to speak falsely, but a man whom he 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 15 

looked at with so much interest, — should embrace 
such views. When he saw Dr. Channing he had 
hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christi- 
anity for what was lovely and excellent, — he loved 
the good in it, and not the true; — "And I tell you, 
sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the 
good, for one person who loved the true ; but it is a 
far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, 
than to love the good for itself alone." He (Cole- 
ridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, 
because he had once been a Unitarian and knew 
what quackery it was. He had been called " the 
rising star of Unitarianism." He went on defining, 
or rather refining : " The Trinitarian doctrine was 
realism ; the idea of God was not essential, but su- 
per-essential ; " talked of trinism and tetrakism 
and much more, of which I only caught this, " that 
the will was that by which a person is a person ; 
because, if one should push me in the street, and 
so. I should force the man next me into the ken- 
nel, I should at once exclaim, I did not do it, sir, 
meaning it was not my will." And this also, that 
" if you should insist on your faith here in England, 
and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of 
the fagot." 

I took advantage of a pause to say that he had 
many readers of all religious opinions in America 
and I proceeded to inquire if the " extract " from 



16 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the Independent's pamphlet, in the third volume 
of the Friend, were a veritable quotation. He re- 
plied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in 
his possession entitled " A Protest of one of the 
Independents," or something to that effect. I told 
him how excellent I thought it and how much I 
wished to see the entire work. "Yes," he said, 
" the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the 
knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the 
passage would no doubt strike you more in the quo- 
tation than in the original, for I have filtered it." 

When I rose to go, he said, " I do not know 
whether you care about poetry, but I will repeat 
some verses I lately made on my baptismal anni- 
versary," and he recited with strong emphasis, 
standing, ten or twelve lines beginning, — 

" Born unto God in Christ " 

He inquired where I had been travelling; and 
on learning that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he 
compared one island with the other, repeating what 
he had said to the Bishop of London when he re- 
turned from that country, that Sicily was an excel- 
lent school of political economy ; for, in any town 
there, it only needed to ask what the government 
enacted, and reverse that, to know what ought to 
be done ; it was the most felicitously opposite legis- 
lation to anything good and wise. There were only 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 17 

three things which the government had brought 
into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox and 
famine. Whereas in Malta, the force of law and 
mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semi- 
Saracen inhabitants the seat of population and 
plenty. Going out, he showed me in the next 
apartment a picture of Allston's, and told me that 
Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, 
and glancing toward this, said " Well, you have 
got a picture ! " thinking it the work of an old 
master ; afterwards, Montague, still talking with 
his back to the canvas, put up his hand and touched 
it, and exclaimed, " By Heaven ! this picture is 
not ten years old : " — so delicate and skilful was 
that man's touch. 

I was in his company for about an hour, but 
find it impossible to recall the largest part of his 
discourse, which was often like so many printed 
paragraphs in his book, — perhaps the same, — so 
readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As 
I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spec- 
tacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the sat- 
isfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoc- 
cupied, and could not bend to a new companion 
and think with him. 



From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On 
my return I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and 

VOL. v. 2 



18 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

being intent on delivering a letter which I had 
brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. 
It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dun- 
score, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed 
near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. 
I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, 
where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty 
heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an au- 
thor who did not need to hide from his readers, 
and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and 
exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own 
terms what is best in London. He was tall and 
gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and 
holding his extraordinary powers of conversation 
in easy command ; clinging to his northern accent 
with evident relish ; full of lively anecdote and with 
a streaming humor which floated every thing he 
looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the fa- 
miliar objects, put the companion at once into an 
acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was 
very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be 
a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and 
lonely the man ; " not a person to speak to within 
sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore ; " 
so that books inevitably made his topics. 

He had names of his own for all the matters 
familiar to his discourse. Blackwood's was the 
" sand magazine ; " Eraser's nearer approach to 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 19 

possibility of life was the " mud magazine ; " a 
piece of road near by, that marked some failed 
enterprise, was the "grave of the last sixpence." 
When too much praise of any genius annoyed him 
he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by 
his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance 
in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his 
pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had 
found out how to let a board down, and had foiled 
him. For all that he still thought man the most 
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked 
Nero's death, " Quails artifex pereo ! " better than 
most history. He worships a man that will man- 
ifest any truth to him. At one time he had in- 
quired and read a good deal about America. Lan- 
dor's principle was mere rebellion; and that he 
feared was the American principle. The best thing 
he knew of that country was that in it a man can 
have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's 
book that when he inquired in a New York hotel 
for the Boots, he had been shown across the street 
and had found Mungo in his own house dining on 
roast turkey. 

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, 
and he disparaged Socrates ; and, when pressed, 
persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he 
called the " splendid bridge from the old world to 
the new." His own reading had been multifarious. 



20 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after 
Eobinson Crusoe, and Robertson's America an 
early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had discov- 
ered to him that he was not a dunce ; and it was 
now ten years since he had learned German, by 
the advice of a man who told him he would find in 
that language what he wanted. 

He took despairing or satirical views of litera- 
ture at this moment ; recounted the incredible 
sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for 
puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is 
trusted now, no books are bought, and the book- 
sellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. 

He still returned to English pauperism, the 
crowded country, the selfish abdication by public 
men of all that public persons should perform. 
Government should direct poor men what to do. 
Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors. 
My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of 
Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the 
next house. But here are thousands of acres 
which might give them all meat, and nobody to 
bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. 
They burned the stacks and so found a way to 
force the rich people to attend to them. 

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked 
at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into 
Wordsworth's country. There we sat down and 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 21 

talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not 
Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for 
he had the natural disinclination of every nimble 
spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not 
like to place himself where no step can be taken. 
But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the 
subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how 
every event affects all the future. "Christ died 
on the tree ; that built Dunscore kirk yonder ; that 
brought you and me together. Time has only a 
relative existence." 

He was already turning his eyes towards Lon- 
don with a scholar's appreciation. London is the 
heart of the world he said, wonderful only from 
the mass of human beings. He liked the huge 
machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's 
boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour 
every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or 
wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out 
good men. He named certain individuals, espe- 
cially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind 
he knew, whom London had well served. 

On the 28th August I went to Rydal Mount, 
to pay my respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His 
daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly, 
white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured 
by green goggles. He sat down, and talked with 



22 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

great simplicity. He had just returned from a 
journey. His health was good, but he had broken 
a tooth by a fall, when walking with two lawyers, 
and had said that he was glad it did not happen 
forty years ago ; whereupon they had praised his 
philosophy. 

He had much to say of America, the more that 
it gave occasion for his favorite topic, — that so- 
ciety is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, 
out of all proportion to its being restrained by 
moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is 
not education. He thinks more of the education 
of circumstances than of tuition. 'T is not question 
whether there are offences of which the law takes 
cognizance, but whether there are offences of which 
the law does not take cognizance. Sin is what he 
fears, — and how society is to escape without grav- 
est mischiefs from this source ? He has even said, 
what seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil 
war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting 
the social ties stronger. " There may be," he said, 
" in America some vulgarity in manner, but that 's 
not important. That comes of the pioneer state of 
things. But I fear they are too much given to the 
making of money ; and secondly, to politics ; that 
they make political distinction the end and not the 
means. And I fear they lack a class of men of 
leisure, — in short, of gentlemen, — to give a tone 






FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 23 

of honor to the community. I am told that things 
are boasted of in the second class of society there, 
which, in England, — God knows, are done in Eng- 
land every day, but would never be spoken of. In 
America I wish to know not how many churches or 
schools, but what newspapers ? My friend Colonel 
Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year 
in America, assures me that the newspapers are 
atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of steal- 
ing spoons ! " He was against taking off the tax 
on newspapers in England, — which the reformers 
represent as a tax upon knowledge, — for this rea- 
son, that they would be inundated with base prints. 
He said he talked on political aspects, for he 
wished to impress on me and all good Americans 
to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c, &c, 
and never to call into action the physical strength 
of the people, as had just now been done in Eng- 
land in the Reform Bill, — a thing prophesied by 
Delolme. He alluded once or twice to his conver- 
sation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited 
him, (laying his hand on a particular chair in 
which the Doctor had sat). 

The conversation turned on books. Lucretius 
he esteems a far higher poet than Virgil ; not in 
his system, which is nothing, but in his power of 
illustration. Faith is necessary to explain any- 
thing and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God 



24 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures we 
had all been reading in Boston), he knew only the 
name. 

I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical arti- 
cles and translations. He said he thought him 
sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe's 
Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all man- 
ner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies 
in the air. He had never gone farther than the 
first part ; so disgusted was he that he threw the 
book across the room. I deprecated this wrath, 
and said what I could for the better parts of the 
book, and he courteously promised to look at it 
again. Carlyle he said wrote most obscurely. 
He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympa- 
thies of every body. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote 
more clearly, though he had always wished Cole- 
ridge would write more to be understood. He led 
me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel 
walk in which thousands of his lines were com- 
posed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no 
loss except for reading, because he never writes 
prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of 
lines in his head before writing them. He had 
just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within 
three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's 
Cave, and was composing a fourth when he was 
called in to see me. He said " If you are inter- 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 25 

ested in my verses perhaps you will like to hear 
these lines." I gladly assented, and he recollected 
himself for a few moments and then stood forth 
and repeated, one after the other, the three entire 
sonnets with great animation. I fancied the sec- 
ond and third more beautiful than his poems are 
wont to be. The third is addressed to the flowers, 
which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are very 
abundant on the top of the rock. The second al- 
ludes to the name of the cave, which is " Cave of 
Music ; " the first to the circumstance of its being 
visited by the promiscuous company of the steam- 
boat. 

This recitation was so unlooked for and surpris- 
ing, — he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, 
and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a school- 
boy declaiming, — that I at first was near to 
laugh; but recollecting myself, that I had come 
thus far to see a poet and he was chanting poems 
to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, 
and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him 
how much the few printed extracts had quickened 
the desire to possess his unpublished poems. He 
replied he never was in haste to publish; partly 
because he corrected a good deal, and every alter- 
ation is ungraciously received after printing ; but 
what he had written would be printed, whether he 
lived or died. I said " Tintern Abbey " appeared 



26 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

to be the favorite poem with the public, but more 
contemplative readers preferred the first books of 
the " Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said " Yes, 
they are better." He preferred such of his poems 
as touched the affections, to any others ; for what- 
ever is didactic, — what theories of society, and so 
on, — might perish quickly ; but whatever com- 
bined a truth with an affection was K-rrjiia 'cs 'act, 
good to-day and good forever. He cited the son- 
net " On the feelings of a high-minded Spaniard," 
which he preferred to any other (I so understood 
him), and the " Two Voices ; " and quoted, with 
evident pleasure, the verses addressed " To the 
Skylark." In this connection he said of the New- 
tonian theory that it might yet be superseded and 
forgotten ; and Dalton's atomic theory. 

When I prepared to depart he said he wished to 
show me what a common person in England could 
do, and he led me into the enclosure of his clerk, 
a young man to whom he had given this slip of 
ground, which was laid out, or its natural capabili- 
ties shown, with much taste. He then said he 
would show me a better way towards the inn ; and 
he walked a good part of a mile, talking and ever 
and anon stopping short to impress the word or 
the verse, and finally parted from me with great 
kindness and returned across the fields. 

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple ad- 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 27 

here nee to truth, and was very willing not to shine ; 
but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. 
To judge from a single conversation, he made the 
impression of a narrow and very English mind ; of 
one who paid for his rare elevation by general 
tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his 
opinions were of no value. It is not very rare to 
find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expi- 
ate their departure from the common in one direc- 
tion, by their conformity in every other. 



CHAPTER II. 

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 

The occasion of my second visit to England was 
an invitation from some Mechanics' Institutes in 
Lancashire and Yorkshire, which separately are 
organized much in the same way as our New Eng- 
land Lyceums, but in 1847 had been linked into a 
" Union," which embraced twenty or thirty towns 
and cities and presently extended into the middle 
counties and northward into Scotland. I was in- 
vited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures 
in them all. The request was urged with every 
kind suggestion and every assurance of aid and 
comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, 
in the sequel, amply redeemed their word. The 
remuneration was equivalent to the fees at that 
time paid in this country for the like services. At 
all events it was sufficient to cover any travelling 
expenses, and the proposal offered an excellent op- 
portunity of seeing the interior of England and 
Scotland, by means of a home and a committee of 
intelligent friends awaiting me in every town. 

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 29 

traveller, nor have I found that long journeys yield 
a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invita- 
tion was repeated and pressed at a moment of more 
leisure and when I was a little spent by some un- 
usual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and 
England was proposed to me. Besides, there were 
at least the dread attraction and salutary influ- 
ences of the sea. So 1 took my berth in the packet- 
ship Washington Irving and sailed from Boston on 
Tuesday, 5th October, 1847. 

On Friday at noon we had only made one hun- 
dred and thirty-four miles. A nimble Indian 
would have swum as far ; but the captain affirmed 
that the ship would show us in time all her paces, 
and we crept along through the floating drift of 
boards, logs and chips, which the rivers of Maine 
and New Brunswick pour into the sea after a 
freshet. 

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day's 
work in four, the storm came, the winds blew, and 
we flew before a north-wester which strained every 
rope and sail. The good ship darts through the 
water all day, all night, like a fish ; quivering with 
speed, gliding through liquid leagues, sliding from 
horizon to horizon. She has passed Cape Sable ; 
she has reached the Banks ; the land-birds are left ; 
gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive and hover 
around ; no fishermen ; she has passed the Banks, 



30 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

left five sail behind her far on the edge of the west 
at sundown, which were far east of us at morn, — 
though they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, 
— and still we fly for our lives. The shortest sea- 
line from Boston to Liverpool is 2,850 miles. This 
a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. A sailing 
ship can never go in a shorter line than 3,000, 
and usually it is much longer. Our good master 
keeps his kites up to the last moment, studding- 
sails alow and aloft, and by incessant straight steer- 
ing, never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the 
law of the ship, — watch on watch, for advantage 
and for life. Since the ship was built, it seems, 
the master never slept but in his day-clothes whilst 
on board. " There are many advantages," says 
Saadi, " in sea-voyaging, but security is not one of 
them." Yet in hurrying over these abysses, what- 
ever dangers we are running into, we are certainly 
running out of the risks of hundreds of miles every 
day, which have their own chances of squall, col- 
lision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold and thunder. Hour 
for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater ; but 
the speed is safety, or twelve days of danger in- 
stead of twenty-four. 

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed 
perhaps, with all her freight, 1,500 tons. The 
mainmast, from the deck to the top-button, meas- 
ured 115 feet ; the length of the deck from stem to 



VOYAGE TO ^ENGLAND. 31 

stern, 155. It is impossible not to personify a 
ship ; every body does, in every thing they say : — 
she behaves well ; she minds her rudder ; she swims 
like a duck ; she runs her nose into the water ; she 
looks into a port. Then that wonderful esprit du 
corps by which we adopt into our self-love every 
thing we touch, makes us all champions of her 
sailing qualities. 

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one 
week she had made 1,467 miles, and now, at night, 
seems to hear the steamer behind her, which left 
Boston to-day at two ; has mended her speed and is 
flying before the gray south wind eleven and a half 
knots the hour. The sea-fire shines in her wake 
and far around wherever a wave breaks. I read 
the hour, 9h. 45', on my watch by this light. Near 
the equator you can read small print by it ; and 
the mate describes the phosphoric insects, when 
taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina po- 
tato. 

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for 
tomatoes and olives. The confinement, cold, mo- 
tion, noise and odor are not to be dispensed with. 
The floor of your room is sloped at an angle of 
twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every morn- 
ing with the belief that some one was tipping up 
my berth. Nobody likes to be treated ignomin- 
iously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, 



32 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 



rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis and 
stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at 
last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. The 
sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, 
what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, 
like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alter- 
nating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or 
smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal ceme- 
tery ? In our graveyards we scoop a pit, but this 
aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms 
and makes a mouthfid of a fleet. To the geolo- 
gist the sea is the only firmament ; the land is in 
perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a 
tumor, now sunk in a chasm, and the registered 
observations of a few hundred years find it in a 
perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps 
its old level ; and 't is no wonder that the history 
of our race is so recent, if the roar of the ocean is 
silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such 
as has been observed, say an inch in a century, 
from east to west on the land, will bury all the 
towns, monuments, bones, and knowledge of man- 
kind, steadily and insensibly. If it is capable of 
these great and secular mischiefs, it is quite as 
ready at private and local damage ; and of this no 
landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such 
discomfort and such danger as the narratives of 
the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 33 

the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe ; but 
the wonder is always new that any sane man can 
be a sailor. And here on the second day of our 
voyage, stepped out a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, 
who had hid himself whilst the ship was in port, in 
the bread-closet, having no money and wishing to 
go to England. The sailors have dressed him in 
Guernsey frock, with a knife in his belt, and he is 
climbing nimbly about after them ; — " likes the 
work first-rate, and if the captain will take him, 
means now to come back again in the ship." The 
mate avers that this is the history of all sailors ; 
nine out of ten are runaway boys ; and adds that 
all of them are sick of the sea, but stay in it out of 
pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant abuse 
and the worst pay. It is a little better with the 
mate and not very much better with the captain. 
A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay. 
If sailors were contented, if they had not resolved 
again and again not to go to sea any more, I should 
respect them. 

Of course the inconveniences and terrors of the 
sea are not of any account to those whose minds 
are preoccupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the 
mountain, the mine, only shatter cockneyism ; every 
noble activity makes room for itself. A great 
mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. And 



34 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the sea is not slow in disclosing inestimable secrets 
to a good naturalist. 

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide 
some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours 
which bad weather, bad company and taverns steal 
from the best economist. Classics which at home 
are drowsily read, have a strange charm in a coun- 
try inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I 
remember that some of the happiest and most val- 
uable hours I have owed to books, passed, many 
years ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment 
I have found at sea is the want of light in the 
cabin. 

We found on board the usual cabin library; 
Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac and 
Sand were our sea-gods. Among the passengers 
there was some variety of talent and profession ; 
we exchanged our experiences and all learned 
something. The busiest talk with leisure and con- 
venience at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact 
turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche 
for, and seize with the joy of a collector. But, 
under the best conditions, a voyage is one of the 
severest tests to try a man. A college examination 
is nothing to it. Sea-days are long — these lack- 
lustre, joyless days which whistled over us ; but 
they were few — only fifteen, as the captain count- 
ed, sixteen according to me. Reckoned from the 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 35 

time when we left soundings, our speed was such 
that the captain drew the line of his course in red 
ink on his chart, for the encouragement or envy of 
future navigators. 

It has been said that the King of England would 
consult his dignity by giving audience to foreign 
ambassadors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And 
I think the white path of an Atlantic ship the right 
avenue to the palace front of this seafaring people, 
who for hundreds of years claimed the strict SOV' 
ereignty of the sea, and exacted toll and the strik- 
ing sail from the ships of all other peoples. When 
their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and 
other junior marines, on the plea that you could 
never anchor on the same wave, or hold property 
in what was always flowing, the English did not 
stick to claim the channel, or bottom of all the 
main : " As if," said they, " we contended for the 
drops of the sea, and not for its situation, or the 
bed of those waters. The sea is bounded by his 
majesty's empire." 

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This 
was inevitably the British side. In every man's 
thought arises now a new system, English senti- 
ments, English loves and fears, English history 
and social modes. Yesterday every passenger had 
measured the speed of the ship by watching the 
bubbles over the ship's bulwarks. To-day, instead 



36 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, Water- 
ford and Ardruore. There lay the green shore of 
Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see 
towns, towers, churches, harvests ; but the curse of 
eight hundred years we could not discern. 






CHAPTER III. 

LAND. 

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only 
countries worth living in ; the former because there 
Nature vindicates her rights and triumphs over the 
evils inflicted by the governments ; the latter be- 
cause art conquers nature and transforms a rude, 
ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and plenty. 
England is a garden. Under an ash-colored sky, 
the fields have been combed and rolled till they 
appear to have been finished with a pencil instead 
of a plough. The solidity of the structures that 
compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. 
Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, val- 
leys, the sea itself, feel the hand of a master. The 
long habitation of a powerful and ingenious race 
has turned every rood of land to its best use, has 
found all the capabilities, the arable soil, the quar- 
riable rock, the highways, the byways, the fords, 
the navigable waters ; and the new arts of inter- 
course meet you every where ; so that England is 
a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is 
provided within the precinct. Cushioned and com- 



38 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

forted in every manner, the traveller rides as on a 
cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and towns, 
through mountains in tunnels of three or four 
miles, at near twice the speed of our trains ; and 
reads quietly the " Times " newspaper, which, by its 
immense correspondence and reporting seems to 
have machinized the rest of the world for his occa- 
sion. 

The problem of the traveller landing at Liver- 
pool is, Why England is England ? What are the 
elements of that power which the English hold 
over other nations? If there be one test of na- 
tional genius universally accepted, it is success; 
and if there be one successful country in the uni- 
verse for the last millennium, that country is Eng- 
land. 

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the 
best of actual nations ; and an American has more 
reasons than another to draw him to Britain. In 
all that is done or begun by the Americans to- 
wards right thinking or practice, we are met by a 
civilization already settled and overpowering. The 
culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, 
are English thoughts and aims. A nation consid- 
erable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, 
in the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and 
stamped the knowledge, activity and power of man- 
kind with its impress. Those who resist it do not 



LAND. 39 

feel it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows 
is aiming to be English. The Turk and Chinese 
also are making awkward efforts to be English. 
The practical common-sense of modern society, the 
utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, re- 
ligion take, is the natural genius of the British 
mind. The influence of France is a constituent 
of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the 
English for the most wholesome effect. The Amer- 
ican is only the continuation of the English genius 
into new conditions, more or less propitious. 

See what books fill our libraries. Every book 
we read, every biography, play, romance, in what- 
ever form, is still English history and manners. 
So that a sensible Englishman once said to me, 
"As long as you do not grant us copyright, we 
shall have the teaching of you." 

But we have the same difficulty in making a 
social or moral estimate of England, that the 
sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause 
which has agitated the whole community and on 
which every body finds himself an interested party. 
Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. Eng- 
land has inoculated all nations with her civiliza- 
tion, intelligence and tastes ; and to resist the tyr- 
anny and prepossession of the British element, a 
serious man must aid himself by comparing with it 
the civilizations of the farthest east and west, the 



40 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal 
standard ; if only by means of the very impatience 
which English forms are sure to awaken in inde- 
pendent minds. 

Besides, if we will visit London, the present 
time is the best time, as some signs portend that it 
has reached its highest point. It is observed that 
the English interest us a little less within a few 
years ; and hence the impression that the British 
power has culminated, is in solstice, or already de- 
clining. 

As soon as you enter England, which, with 
Wales, is no larger than the State of Georgia, 1 
this little land stretches by an illusion to the di- 
mensions of an empire. The innumerable details, 
the crowded succession of towns, cities, cathedrals, 
castles and great and decorated estates, the number 
and power of the trades and guilds, the military 
strength and splendor, the multitudes of rich and 
of remarkable people, the servants and equipages, 
— all these catching the eye and never allowing it 
to pause, hide all boundaries by the impression of 
magnificence and endless wealth. 

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this 
and that object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, 
to see England well needs a hundred years ; for 

1 Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equiva- 
lent for the area of Scotland. 



LAND. 41 

what they told me was the merit of Sir John 
Soane's Museum, in London, — that it was well 
packed and well saved, — is the merit of England ; 
— it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, with 
towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals 
and charity-houses. In the history of art it is a 
long way from a cromlech to York minster ; yet all 
the intermediate steps may still be traced in this 
all-preserving island. 

The territory has a singular perfection. The 
climate is warmer by many degrees than it is en- 
titled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there 
is no hour in the whole year when one cannot 
work. Here is no winter, but such days as we 
have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature 
which makes no exhausting demand on human 
strength, but allows the attainment of the largest 
stature. Charles the Second said " It invited men 
abroad more days in the year and more hours in 
the day than another country." Then England has 
all the materials of a working country except wood. 
The constant rain, — a rain with every tide, in 
some parts of the island, — keeps its multitude of 
rivers full and brings agricultural production up to 
the highest point. It has plenty of water, of stone, 
of potter's clay, of coal, of salt and of iron. The 
land naturally abounds with game ; immense heaths 
and downs are paved with quails, grouse and wood- 



42 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

cock, and the shores are animated by water-birds. 
The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with 
fish ; there are salmon for the rich and sprats and 
herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the 
herring are in innumerable shoals ; at one season, 
the country people say, the lakes contain one part 
water and two parts fish. 

The only drawback on this industrial conven- 
iency is the darkness of its sky. The night and 
day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes 
to read and to write. Add the coal smoke. In 
the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or blacks 
darken the day, give white sheep the color of black 
sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the 
air, poison many plants and corrode the monuments 
and buildings. 

The London fog aggravates the distempers of 
the sky, and sometimes justifies the epigram on the 
climate by an English wit, " in a fine day, looking 
up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one." 
A gentleman in Liverpool told me that he found 
he could do without a fire in his parlor about one 
day in the year. It is however pretended that the 
enormous consumption of coal in the island is also 
felt in modifying the general climate. 

Factitious climate, factitious position. England 
resembles a ship in its shape, and if it were one, 
its best admiral could not have worked it or an- 



LAND. 43 

chored it in a more judicious or effective position. 
Sir John Herschel said " London is the centre of 
the terrene globe." The shopkeeping nation, to 
use a shop word, has a good stand. The old Ve- 
netians pleased themselves with the flattery that 
Venice was in 45°, midway between the poles and 
the line ; as if that were an imperial centrality. 
Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the navel 
of the earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the 
earth to be an animal. The Jews believed Jerusa- 
lem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric 
chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia 
was in the same thermic belt, and by inference in 
the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, 
Rome and London. It was drawn by a patriotic 
Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, 
under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut 
Street. But when carried to Charleston, to New 
Orleans and to Boston, it somehow failed to con- 
vince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals. 

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, 
and right in the heart of the modern world. The 
sea, which, according to Virgil's famous line, di- 
vided the poor Britons utterly from the world, 
proved to be the ring of marriage with all nations. 
It is not down in the books, — it is written only 
in the geologic strata, — that fortunate day when a 
wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus 



44 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and 
gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable 
sea-wall, cutting off an island of eight hundred 
miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching 
to three hundred miles; a territory large enough 
for independence, enriched with every seed of na- 
tional power, so near that it can see the harvests 
of the continent, and so far that who would cross 
the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for 
tempests. As America, Europe and Asia lie, these 
Britons have precisely the best commercial position 
in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for 
all the goods they can manufacture. And to make 
these advantages avail, the river Thames must dig 
its spacious outlet to the sea from the heart of the 
kingdom, giving road and landing to innumerable 
ships, and all the conveniency to trade that a peo- 
ple so skilful and sufficient in economizing water- 
front by docks, warehouses and lighters required. 
When James the First declared his purpose of 
punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord 
Mayor replied that " in removing his royal presence 
from his lieges, they hoped he would leave them 
the Thames." 

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature 
of Europe, having plain, forest, marsh, river, sea- 
shore ; mines in Cornwall ; caves in Matlock and 
Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, de- 



LAND. 45 

licious sea- view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scotland, 
Snowdon in Wales, and in Westmoreland and 
Cumberland a pocket Switzerland, in which the 
lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill 
the eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation 
conveniently small. Fontenelle thought that na- 
ture had sometimes a little affectation ; and there 
is such an artificial completenesss in this nation of 
artificers as if there were a design from the begin- 
ning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature 
held counsel with herself and said, ' My Romans 
are gone. To build my new empire, I will choose a 
rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. I 
will not grudge a competition of the roughest males. 
Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the 
strongest ! For I have work that requires the 
best will and sinew. Sharp and temperate north- 
ern breezes shall blow, to keep that will alive and 
alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others, 
and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give 
them markets on every side. Long time I will 
keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, 
seafaring, sea-risk« and the stimulus of gain. An 
island, — but not so large, the people not so many 
as to glut the great markets and depress one an- 
other, but proportioned to the size of Europe and 
the continents.' 

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its 



46 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

civil influence radiate. It is a singular coinci- 
dence to this geographic centrality, the spiritual 
centrality which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to 
the people. " For the English nation, the best of 
them are in the centre of all Christians, because 
they have interior intellectual light. This appears 
conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light 
they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, 
and thereby of thinking." 






CHAPTER IV. 
RACE. 

An ingenious anatomist has written a book 2 to 
prove that races are imperishable, but nations are 
pliant political constructions, easily changed or de- 
stroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed 
races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal 
or metaphysical necessity; nor did he on the other 
hand count with precision the existing races and 
settle the true bounds ; a point of nicety, and the 
popidar test of the theory. The individuals at the 
extremes of divergence in one race of men are as 
unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety 
shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you 
cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. 
Hence every writer makes a different count. Blu- 
menbach reckons five races ; Humboldt three ; and 
Mr. Pickering, who lately in our Exploring Expe- 
dition thinks he saw all the kinds of men that can 
be on the planet, makes eleven. 

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 
1848) 222,000,000 souls, — perhaps a fifth of the 

1 The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London: 1850. 



48 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

population of the globe ; and to comprise a territory 
of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British 
people predominated. Perhaps forty of these mill- 
ions are of British stock. Add the United States 
of America, which reckon (in the same year), ex- 
clusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a terri- 
tory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the 
foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly 
assimilated, and you have a population of English 
descent and language of 60,000,000, and governing 
a population of 245,000,000 souls. 

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven 
and a half millions in the home countries. What 
makes this census important is the quality of the 
units that compose it. They are free forcible men, 
in a country where life is safe and has reached the 
greatest value. They give the bias to the current 
age ; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by 
their character and by the number of individuals 
among them of personal ability. It has been de- 
nied that the English have genius. Be it as it 
may, men of vast intellect have been born on their 
soil, and they have made or applied the principal 
inventions. They have sound bodies and supreme 
endurance in war and in labor. The spawning 
force of the race has sufficed to the colonization 
of great parts of the world ; yet it remains to be 
seen whether they can make good the exodus of 



RACE. 49 

millions from Great Britain, amounting in 1852 
to more than a thousand a day. They have assim- 
ilating force, since they are imitated by their for- 
eign subjects; and they are still aggressive and 
propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts 
and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slav- 
ery does not exist under them. What oppression 
exists is incidental and temporary ; their success is 
not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained 
constancy and self-equality for many ages. 

Is this power due to their race, or to some other 
cause ? Men hear gladly of the power of blood or 
race. Every body likes to know that his advan- 
tages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to 
local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws 
and traditions, nor to fortune ; but to superior brain, 
as it makes the praise more personal to him. 

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something 
like that law of physiology that whatever bone, 
muscle, or essential organ is found in one healthy 
individual, the same part or organ may be found 
in or near the same place in its congener ; and we 
look to find in the son every mental and moral 
property that existed in the ancestor. In race, it 
is not the broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature 
that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches 
as far as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown 
begin. Then first we care to examine the pedi- 



50 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

gree, and copy heedf ully the training, — what food 
they ate, what nursing, school, and exercises they 
had, which resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of 
thought and robust wisdom. How came such men 
as King Alfred, and Roger Bacon, William of 
Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac 
Newton, William Shakspeare, George Chapman, 
Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to 
exist here? What made these delicate natures? 
was it the air ? was it the sea ? was it the parent- 
age ? For it is certain that these men are samples 
of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is al- 
ways found close to the speaking tongue, and no 
genius can long or often utter any thing which is 
not invited and gladly entertained by men around 
him. 

It is race, is it not ? that puts the hundred mill- 
ions of India under the dominion of a remote is- 
land in the north of Europe. Race avails much, 
if that be true which is alleged, that all Celts are 
Catholics and all Saxons are Protestants ; that 
Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the repre- 
sentative principle. Race is a controlling influence 
in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every 
climate, has preserved the same character and em- 
ployments. Race in the negro is of appalling im- 
portance. The French in Canada, cut off from all 
intercourse with the parent people, have held their 



RACE. 51 

national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus " On the 
Manners of the Germans," not long since, in Mis- 
souri and the heart of Illinois, and I found abun- 
dant points of resemblance between the Germans 
of the Hercynian forest, and our Uoosiers, Suckers 
and Badgers of the American woods. 

But whilst race works immortally to keep its 
own, it is resisted by other forces. Civilization is 
a re-agent, and eats away the old traits. The 
Arabs of to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh ; but the 
Briton of to-day is a very different person from 
Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious sect has 
its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a 
face ; the Quakers, a face ; the nuns, a face. An 
Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his man- 
ners. Trades and professions carve their own lines 
on face and form. Certain circumstances of Eng- 
lish life are not less effective ; as personal liberty ; 
plenty of food ; good ale and mutton ; open mar- 
ket, or good wages for every kind of labor ; high 
bribes to talent and skill ; the island life, or the 
million opportunities and outlets for expanding and 
misplaced talent; readiness of combination among 
themselves for politics or for business ; strikes ; and 
sense of superiority founded on habit of victory in 
labor and in war : and the appetite for superiority 
grows by feeding. 

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to 



52 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

race. Credence is a main element. 'T is said that 
the views of nature held by any people determine 
all their institutions. Whatever influences add to 
mental or moral faculty, take men out of national- 
ity as out of other conditions, and make the na- 
tional life a culpable compromise. 

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of 
race suggest others which threaten to undermine it, 
as not sufficiently based. The fixity or inconverti- 
bleness of races as we see them is a weak argument 
for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all 
our historical period is a point to the duration in 
which nature has wrought. Any the least and sol- 
itariest fact in our natural history, such as the mel- 
ioration of fruits and of animal stocks, has the 
worth of a power in the opportunity of geologic pe- 
riods. Moreover, though we flatter the self-love of 
men and nations by the legend of pure races, all 
our experience is of the gradation and resolution 
of races, and strange resemblances meet us every- 
where. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Pap- 
uan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should 
mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and ba- 
boon in our human form, and know that the bar- 
riers of races are not so firm but that some spray 
sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas. 

The low organizations are simplest ; a mere 
mouth, a jelly, or a straight worm. As the scale 



RACE. 53 

mounts, the organizations become complex. We 
are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves in- 
oculation. A child blends in his face the faces of 
both parents and some feature from every ancestor 
whose face hangs on the wall. The best nations 
are those most widely related ; and navigation, as 
effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent 
advancer of nations. 

The English composite character betrays a mixed 
origin. Every thing English is a fusion of distant 
and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed ; 
the names of men are of different nations, — three 
languages, three or four nations ; — the currents 
of thought are counter : contemplation and practi- 
cal skill ; active intellect and dead conservatism ; 
world-wide enterprise and devoted use and wont ; 
aggressive freedom and hospitable law with bitter 
class-legislation ; a people scattered by their wars 
and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and 
homesick to a man ; a country of extremes, — dukes 
and chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked hea- 
then colliers ; — nothing can be praised in it with- 
out damning exceptions, and nothing denounced 
without salvos of cordial praise. 
~ Neither do this people appear to be of one stem, 
but collectively a better race than any from which 
they are derived. Nor is it easy to trace it home 
to its original seats. Who can call by right names 



54 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

what races are in Britain ? Who can trace them 
historically ? Who can discriminate them anatom- 
ically, or metaphysically ? 

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction 
on the historical question of race, and — come of 
whatever disputable ancestry — the indisputable 
Englishman before me, himself very well marked, 
and nowhere else to be found, — I fancied I could 
leave quite aside the choice of a tribe as his lineal 
progenitors. Defoe_ said in his wrath, " the Eng- 
lishman was the mud of all races." I incline to 
the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make mor- 
tar, so certain temperaments marry well, and, by 
well -managed contrarieties, develop as drastic a 
character as the English. On the whole it is not 
so much a history of one or of certain tribes of 
Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place 
and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of 
temperaments out of them all. Certain tempera- 
ments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight 
or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred 
pear-trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard 
and thrive, — whilst all the unadapted tempera- 
ments die out. 

The English derive their pedigree from such a 
range of nationalities that there needs sea-room 
and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and 
character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic 



RACE. 55 

battery, to distribute acids at one pole and alkalies 
at the other. So England tends to accumulate her 
liberals in America, and her conservatives at Lon- 
don. The Scandinavians in her race still hear in 
every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean ; 
the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still. 

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are 
not of race, what we think of when we talk of Eng- 
lish traits really narrows itself to a small district. 
It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and 
reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those 
who come and go thither. The portraits that hang 
on the walls in the Academy Exhibition at London, 
the figures in Punch's drawings of the public men 
or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop-win- 
dows, are distinctive English, and not American, 
no, nor Scotch, nor Irish : but 'tis a very restricted 
nationality. As you go north into the manufac- 
turing and agricultural districts, and to the popu- 
lation that never travels ; as you go into Yorkshire, 
as you enter Scotland, the world's Englishman is 
no longer found. In Scotland there is a rapid 
loss of all grandeur of mien and manners ; a pro- 
vincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the pov- 
erty of the country makes itself remarked, and a 
coarseness of manners ; and, among the intellectual, 
is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland are the 
same climate and soil as in England, but less food, 



56 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

no right relation to the land, political dependence, 
small tenantry and an inferior or misplaced race. 

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may 
be well allowed, for there is no prosperity that 
seems more to depend on the kind of man than 
British prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people 
could have made this small territory great. We 
say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the boats 
are anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that 
wins. Put the best sailing-master into either boat, 
and he will win. 

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of un- 
broken traditions, though vague and losing them- 
selves in fable. The traditions have got footing, 
and refuse to be disturbed. The kitchen-clock is 
more convenient than sidereal time. We must use 
the popular category, as we do the Linnsean classi- 
fication, for convenience, and not as exact and 
final. Otherwise we are presently confounded when 
the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by 
some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of 
the rival tribe. 

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the 
ruddy complexion fair and plump, robust men, with 
faces cut like a die, and a strong island speech and 
accent ; a Norman type, with the complacency that 
belongs to that constitution. Others who might be 
Americans, for any thing that appeared in their 



RACE. 57 

complexion or form; and their speech was much 
less marked and their thought much less bound. 
We will call them Saxons. Then the Koman has 
implanted his dark complexion in the trinity or 
quaternity of bloods. 

1. The sources from which tradition derives their 
stock are mainly three. And first they are of the 
oldest blood of the world, — the Celtic. Some peo- 
ples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the 
Greeks ? Where the Etrurians ? Where the Eo- 
mans ? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old fam- 
ily, of whose beginning there is no memory, and 
their end is likely to be still more remote in the 
future ; for they have endurance and productive- 
ness. They planted Britain, and gave to the seas 
and mountains names which are poems and imitate 
the pure voices of nature. They are favorably re- 
membered in the oldest records of Europe. They 
had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman 
owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, 
priestly culture and a sublime creed. They have a 
hidden and precarious genius. They made the best 
popular literature of the Middle Ages in the songs 
of Merlin and the tender and delicious mythology 
of Arthur. 

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, 
whom the Romans found hard to conquer in two 



58 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

hundred and ten years, — say impossible to con- 
quer, when one remembers the long sequel ; — a 
people about whom in the old empire the rumor 
ran there was never any that meddled with them 
that repented it not. 

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of 
Narbonnese Gaul, looked out of a window and saw 
a fleet of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. 
They even entered the port of the town where he 
was, causing no small alarm and sudden manning 
and arming of his galleys. As they put out to sea 
again, the emperor gazed long after them, his eyes 
bathed in tears. "I am tormented with sorrow," 
he said, " when I foresee the evils they will bring 
on my posterity." There was reason for these 
Xerxes' tears. The men who have built a ship and 
invented the rig, cordage, sail, compass and pump ; 
the working in and out of port, have acquired much 
more than a ship. Now arm them and every shore 
is at their mercy. For if they have not numerical 
superiority where they anchor, they have only to 
sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of 
war, namely of concentrating force on the point of 
attack, must always be theirs who have the choice 
of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the 
fight from a higher ground of power than the land- 
nations ; and can engage them on shore with a vic- 
torious advantage in the retreat. As soon as the 



RACE. 59 

shores are sufficiently peopled to make piracy a los- 
ing business, the same skill and courage are ready 
for the service of trade. 

The " Heimskringla," * or Sagas of the Kings of 
Norway, collected by Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad 
and Odyssey of English history. Its portraits, like 
Homer's, are strongly individualized. The Sagas 
describe a monarchical republic like Sparta. The 
government disappears before the importance of cit- 
izens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and per- 
ish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders 
or landholders, every one of whom is named and 
personally and patronymically described, as the 
king's friend and companion. A sparse population 
gives this high worth to every man. Individuals 
are often noticed as very handsome persons, which 
trait only brings the story nearer to the English 
race. Then the solid material interest predomi- 
nates, so dear to English understanding, wherein 
the association is logical, between merit and land. 
The heroes of the Sagas are not the knights of 
South Europe. No vaporing of France and Spain 
has corrupted them. They are substantial farmers 
whom the rough times have forced to defend their 
properties. They have weapons which they use in 
a determined manner, by no means for chivalry, 

1 Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. Lon- 
don : 1844. 



60 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

but for their acres. They are people considerably 
advanced in rural arts, living amphibiously on a 
rough coast, and drawing half their food from the 
sea and half from the land. They have herds of 
cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese. 
A king among these farmers has a varying power, 
sometimes not exceeding the authority of a sheriff. 
They fish in the fiord and hunt the deer. A king 
was maintained, much as in some of our country 
districts a winter-schoolmaster is quartered, a week 
here, a week there, and a fortnight on the next 
farm, — on all the farms in rotation. This the 
king calls going into guest-quarters ; and it was the 
only way in which, in a poor country, a poor king 
with many retainers could be kept alive when he 
leaves his own farm to collect his dues through the 
kingdom. 

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the 
main, with good sense, steadiness, wise speech and 
prompt action. But they have a singular turn for 
homicide ; their chief end of man is to murder or 
to be murdered ; oars, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, 
peatknives and hayforks are tools valued by them 
all the more for their charming aptitude for assas- 
sinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will di- 
vert themselves by thrusting each his sword through 
the other's body, as did Yngve and Alf . Another 
pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and finding 



RACE, 61 

no weapon near, will take the bits out of their 
horses' mouths and crush each other's heads with 
them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent- 
cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging some- 
body, a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king. 
If a farmer has so much as a hayfork, he sticks it 
into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly 
amusing to burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, 
after getting them drunk. Never was poor gentle- 
man so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, 
as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other 
quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by a 
bull's horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like 
the agricultural King Onund. Odin died in his 
bed, in Sweden ; but it was a proverb of ill con- 
dition to die the death of old age. King Hake of 
Sweden cuts and slashes in battle, as long as he 
can stand, then orders his war-ship, loaded with his 
dead men and their weapons, to be taken out to sea, 
the tiller shipped and the sails spread ; being left 
alone he sets fire to some tar-wood and lies down 
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, 
the ship flew, burning in clear flame, out between 
the islets into the ocean, and there was the right 
end of King Hake. 

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical ; 
the later are of a noble strain. History rarely 
yields us better passages than the conversation be- 



62 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

tween King Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein 
his brother, on their respective merits, — one the 
soldier, and the other a lover of the arts of peace. 

But the reader of the Norman history must steel 
himself by holding fast the remote compensations 
which result from animal vigor. As the old fossil 
world shows that the first steps of reducing the 
chaos were confided to saurians and other huge and 
horrible animals, so the foundations of the new 
civility were to be laid by the most savage men. 

The Normans came out of France into England 
worse men than they went into it one hundred and 
sixty years before. They had lost their own lan- 
guage and learned the Romance or barbarous Latin 
of the Gauls, and had acquired, with the language, 
all the vices it had names for. The conquest has 
obtained in the chronicles the name of the " mem- 
ory of sorrow." Twenty thousand thieves landed 
at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords 
were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy 
and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they 
took everything they could carry, they burned, har- 
ried, violated, tortured and killed, mitil every thing 
English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such 
however is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that 
decent and dignified men now existing boast their 
descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a fai- 
nter conviction of their own merits, by assum- 



RACE. 63 

ing for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, 
wolf and snake, which they severally resembled. 

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in 
the tenth and eleventh centuries, and was the re- 
ceptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous 
population was poured. The continued draught of 
the best men in Norway, Sweden and Denmark to 
these piratical expeditions exhausted those countries, 
like a tree which bears much fruit when young, 
and these have been second-rate powers ever since. 
The power of the race migrated and left Norway 
void. King Olaf said " When King Harold, my 
father, went westward to England, the chosen men 
in Norway followed him ; but Norway was so 
emptied then, that such men have not since been to 
find in the country, nor especially such a leader as 
King Harold was for wisdom and bravery." 

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, 
in 1801, the British government sent Nelson to 
bombard the Danish forts in the Sound, and, in 
1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the en- 
tire Danish fleet, as it lay in the basins, and all the 
equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to 
England. Konghelle, the town where the kings of 
Norway, Sweden and Denmark were wont to meet, 
is now rented to a private English gentleman for 
a hunting ground. 

It took many generations to trim and comb and 



64 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

perfume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into 
royal highnesses and most noble Knights of the 
Garter ; but every sparkle of ornament dates back 
to the Norse boat. There will be time enough to 
mellow this strength into civility and religion. It 
is a medical fact that the children of the blind see ; 
the children of felons have a healthy conscience. 
Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of pu- 
berty, transformed into a serious and generous 
youth. 

The mildness of the following ages has not quite 
effaced these traits of Odin ; as the rudiment of a 
structure matured in the tiger is said to be still 
found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The na- 
tion has a tough, acrid, animal nature, which cen- 
turies of churching and civilizing have not been 
able to sweeten. Alfieri said " the crimes of Italy 
were the proof of the superiority of the stock ; " 
and one may say of England that this watch moves 
on a splinter of adamant. The English uncultured 
are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded in their 
calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of 
cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a 
fair stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners 
in the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-bait- 
ing, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the 
readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to 
the English of all classes. The costermongers of 






RACE. 65 

} war dice in loathing : — "we 
must work our fists well ; we are all handy with 
our fists." The public schools are charged with 
being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and are 
liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is 
a trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life 
of Shelley, relates that at a military school they 
rolled up a young man in a snowball, and left 
him so in his room while the other cadets went to 
church ; — and crippled him for life. They have 
retained impressment, deck-flogging, army-flogging 
and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of the 
army discipline that a soldier, sentenced to flog- 
ging, sometimes prays that his sentence may be 
commuted to death. Flogging, banished from the 
armies of Western Europe, remains here by the 
sanction of the Duke of Wellington. The right of 
the husband to sell the wife has been retained down 
to our times. The Jews have been the favorite 
victims of royal and popular persecution. Henry 
III. mortgaged all the Jews in the kingdom to his 
brother the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money 
which he borrowed. The torture of criminals, and 
the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly dis- 
used. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Rom- 
illy said " I have examined the codes of all na- 
tions, and ours is the worst, and worthy of the 
Anthropophagi." In the last session (1848), the 



66 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

House of Commons was listening to the details of 
flogging and torture practised in the jails. 

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, 
got a hardy people into it, they could not help be- 
coming the sailors and factors of the globe. From 
childhood, they dabbled in water, they swam like 
fishes, their playthings were boats. In the case of 
the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, 
that " England being an island, the very midland 
shires therein are all to be accounted maritime ; " 
and Fuller adds, "the genius even of landlocked 
counties driving the natives with a maritime dex- 
terity." As early as the conquest it is remarked, 
in explanation of the wealth of England, that its 
merchants trade to all countries. 

The English at the present day have great vigor 
of body and endurance. Other countrymen look 
slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. 
They are bigger men than the Americans. I sup- 
pose a hundred English taken at random out of 
the street would weigh a fourth more than so many 
Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not 
larger. They are round, ruddy, and handsome ; at 
least the whole bust is well formed, and there is 
a tendency to stout and powerful frames. I re- 
marked the stoutness on my first landing at Liver- 
pool ; porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — what 
substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures, with 



RACE. 67 

costume and manners to suit. The American lias 
arrived at the old mansion-house and finds himself 
among uncles, aunts and grandsires. The pictures 
on the chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures o£ 
these people. Here they are in the identical cos- 
tumes and air which so took him. 

It is the fault of their forms that they grow 
stocky, and the women have that disadvantage, — 
few tall, slender figures of flowing shape, but 
stunted and thickset persons. The French say 
that the Englishwomen have two left hands. But 
in all ages they are a handsome race. The bronze 
monuments of crusaders lying cross-legged in the 
Temple Church at London, and those in Worces- 
ter and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven 
hundred years old, are of the same type as the best 
youthful heads of men now in England ; — please 
by beauty of the same character, an expression 
blending goodnature, valor and refinement, and 
mainly by that uncorrupt youth in the face of man- 
hood, which is daily seen in the streets of London. 

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are dis- 
tinguished for beauty. The anecdote of the hand- 
some captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, 
A. D. 600, is matched by the testimony of the 
Norman chroniclers, ^.\e centuries later, who won- 
dered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the 
young English captives. Meantime the "Heims- 



68 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

kringla " has frequent occasion to speak of the per- 
sonal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered 
what humanity, what resources of mental and moral 
power the traits of the blonde race betoken, its 
accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, 
wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated 
at last by humanity and shall plough in its furrow 
henceforward. It is not a final race, once a crab 
always crab, — but a race with a future. 

On the English face are combined decision and 
nerve with the fair complexion, blue eyes and open 
and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence 
the sensibility, the fine perception and poetic con- 
struction. The fair Saxon man, with open front 
and honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not 
the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or 
assassin is made, but he is moulded for law, law- 
ful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of chil- 
dren, for colleges, churches, charities and colonies. 

They are rather manly than warlike. When the 
war is over, the mask falls from the affectionate 
and domestic tastes, which make them women in 
kindness. This union of qualities is fabled in their 
national legend of "Beauty and the Beast," or, 
long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite. 
The two sexes are co-present in the English mind. 
I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and colonies, 
the words in which her latest novelist portrays his 






RACE. 69 

heroine ; " She is as mild as she is game, and as 
game as she is mild." The English delight in the 
antagonism which combines in one person the ex- 
tremes of courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying 
at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood, 
and like an innocent schoolboy that goes to bed, 
says " Kiss me, Hardy," and turns to sleep. Lord 
Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the most 
affectionate and domestic. Admiral Kodney's fig- 
ure approached to delicacy and effeminacy, and he 
declared himself very sensible to fear, which he 
surmounted only by considerations of honor and 
public duty. Clarendon says the Duke of Buck- 
ingham was so modest and gentle, that some cour- 
tiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they 
found that this modesty and effeminacy was only 
a mask for the most terrible determination. And 
Sir Edward Parry said of Sir John Franklin, that 
" if he found Wellington Sound open, he explored 
it ; for he was a man who never turned his back 
on a danger, yet of that tenderness that he would 
not brush away a mosquito." Even for their high- 
waymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin 
Hood comes described to us as mitissimus prcedo- 
num ; the gentlest thief. But they know where 
their war-dogs lie. Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, 
Chatham, Nelson and Wellington are not to be 
trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at 



70 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the bottom of society, the animal ferocity of the 
quays and cockpits, the bullies of the costermon- 
gers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials and Spitalfields, 
they know how to wake up. 

They have a vigorous health and last well into 
middle and old age. The old men are as red as 
roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach- 
bloom complexion and good teeth are found all 
over the island. They use a plentiful and nutri- 
tious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water- 
cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread and malt-liq- 
uors are universal among the first-class laborers. 
Good feeding is a chief point of national pride 
among the vulgar, and in their caricatures they 
represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body. 
It is curious that Tacitus found the English beer 
already in use among the Germans : " They make 
from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some 
resemblance to wine." Lord Chief Justice For- 
tescue, in Henry VI.'s time, says " The inhabitants 
of England drink no water, unless at certain times 
on a religious score and by way of penance." The 
extremes of poverty and ascetic penance, it would 
seem, never reach cold water in England. "Wood 
the antiquary, in describing the poverty and mac- 
eration of Father Lacey, an English Jesuit, does 
not deny him beer. He says " His bed was under 
a thatching, and the way to it up a ladder ; his 



RACE. 71 

fare was coarse ; his drink, of a penny a gawn, or 
gallon." 

They have more constitutional energy than any 
other people. They think, with Henri Quatre, 
that manly exercises are the foundation of that ele- 
vation of mind which gives one nature ascendant 
over another ; or with the Arabs, that the days 
spent in the chase are not counted in the length 
of life. They box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail 
from pole to pole. They eat and drink, and live 
jolly in the open air, putting a bar of solid sleep 
between day and day. They walk and ride as fast 
as they can, their head bent forward, as if urged 
on some pressing affair. The French say that 
Englishmen in the street always walk straight be- 
fore them like mad dogs. Men and women walk 
with infatuation. As soon as he can handle a gun, 
hunting is the fine art of every Englishman of con- 
dition. They are the most voracious people of prey 
that ever existed. Every season turns out the aris- 
tocracy into the country to shoot and fish. The 
more vigorous run out of the island to America, to 
Asia, to Africa and Australia, to hunt with fury 
by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with dog, 
with horse, with elephant or with dromedary, all 
the game that is in nature. These men have writ- 
ten the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, 
Scrope, Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Cumming and 



72 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

a host of travellers. The people at home are ad- 
dicted to boxing, running, leaping and rowing 
matches. 

I suppose the dogs and horses must be thanked 
for the fact that the men have muscles almost as 
tough and supple as their own. If in every effi- 
cient man there is first a fine animal, in the Eng- 
lish race it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, 
broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good 
cheer and a little overloaded by his flesh. Men of 
animal nature rely, like animals, on their instincts. 
The Englishman associates well with dogs and 
horses. His attachment to the horse arises from 
the courage and address required to manage it. 
The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does 
not disguise its opinion. Their young boiling 
clerks and lusty collegians like the company of 
horses better than the company of professors. I 
suppose the horses are better company for them. 
The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If 
you go into the streets, every driver in 'bus or dray 
is a bully, and if I wanted a good troop of soldiers, 
I should recruit among the stables. Add a certain 
degree of refinement to the vivacity of these riders, 
and you obtain the precise quality which makes the 
men and women of polite society formidable. 

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with 
Hengst and Horsa for their Saxon founders. The 



RACE. 73 

other branch of their race had been Tartar nomads. 
The horse was ail their wealth. The children were 
fed on mares' milk. The pastures of Tartary were 
still remembered by the tenacious practice of the 
Norsemen to eat horseflesh at religious feasts. In 
the Danish invasions the marauders seized upon 
horses where they landed, and were at once con- 
verted into a body of expert cavalry. 

At one time this skill seems to have declined. 
Two centuries ago the English horse never per- 
formed any eminent service beyond the seas ; and 
the reason assigned was that the genius of the Eng- 
lish hath always more inclined them to foot-service, 
as pure and proper manhood, without any mixture ; 
whilst in a victory on horseback, the credit ought 
to be divided betwixt the man and his horse. But 
in two hundred years a change has taken place. 
Now, they boast that they understand horses bet- 
ter than any other people in the world, and that 
their horses are become their second selves. 

" William the Conqueror being " says Camden, 
"better affected to beasts than to men, imposed 
heavy fines and punishments on those that should 
meddle with his game." The Saxon Chronicle 
says " he loved the tall deer as if he were their 
father." And rich Englishmen have followed his 
example, according to their ability, ever since, in 
encroaching on the tillage and commons with their 



74 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

game-preserves. It is a proverb in England that 
it is safer to shoot a man than a hare. The sever- 
ity of the game-laws certainly indicates an extrav- 
agant sympathy of the nation with horses and hunt- 
ers. The gentlemen are always on horseback, and 
have brought horses to an ideal perfection ; the 
English racer is a factitious breed. A score or 
two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be seen 
running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep 
as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined 
with pictures of races; telegraphs communicate, 
every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket 
and Ascot ; and the House of Commons adjourns 
over the " Derby Day." 



CHAPTER V. 

ABILITY. 

The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandi- 
navians. History does not allow us to fix the 
limits of the application of these names with any 
accuracy, but from the residence of a portion of 
these people in France, and from some effect of 
that powerful soil on their blood and manners, the 
Norman has come popularly to represent in Eng- 
land the aristocratic, and the Saxon the democratic 
principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles 
are of both tribes, and the workers of both, yet 
we are forced to use the names a little mythically, 
one to represent the worker and the other the en- 
joyer. 

The island was a prize for the best race. Each 
of the dominant races tried its fortune in turn. 
The Phoenician, the Celt and the Goth had already 
got in. The Roman came, but in the very day 
when his fortune culminated. He looked in the 
eyes of a new people that was to supplant his own. 
He disembarked his legions, erected his camps 
and towers, — presently he heard bad news from 



76 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Italy, and worse and worse, every year ; at last, he 
made a handsome compliment of roads and walls, 
and departed. But the Saxon seriously settled in 
the land, builded, tilled, fished and traded, with 
German truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came 
and divided with him. Last of all the Norman or 
French-Dane arrived, and formally conquered, 
harried and ruled the kingdom. A century later 
it came out that the Saxon had the most bottom 
and longevity, had managed to make the victor 
sjDeak the language and accept the law and usage 
of the victim ; forced the baron to dictate Saxon 
terms to Norman kings ; and, step by step, got all 
the essential securities of civil liberty invented and 
confirmed. The genius of the race and the genius 
of the place conspired to this effect. The island 
is lucrative to free labor, but not worth possession 
on other terms. The race was so intellectual that 
a feudal or military tenure could not last longer 
than the war. The power of the Saxon -Danes, 
so thoroughly beaten in the war that the name of 
English and villein were synonymous, yet so viva- 
cious as to extort charters from the kings, stood 
on the strong personality of these people. Sense 
and economy must rule in a world which is made 
of sense and economy, and the banker, with his 
seven per cent., drives the earl out of his castle. 
A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down a com- 



ABILITY. 77 

monalty of shrewd scientific persons. What signi- 
fies a pedigree of a hundred links, against a cotton- 
spinner with steam in his mill ; or against a 
company of broad-shouldered Liverpool merchants, 
for whom Stephenson and Brunei are contriving 
locomotives and a tubular bridge ? 

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They 
have the taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or 
repose, and the telescopic appreciation of distant 
gain. They are the wealth-makers, — and by dint 
of mental faculty which has its own conditions. 
The Saxon works after liking, or only for himself ; 
and to set him at work and to begin to draw his 
monstrous values out of barren Britain, all dis- 
honor, fret and barrier must be removed, and then 
his energies begin to play. 

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by 
Trolls, — a kind of goblin men with vast power 
of work and skilful production, — divine steve- 
dores, carpenters, reapers, smiths and masons, swift 
to reward every kindness done them, with gifts of 
gold and silver. In all English history this dream 
comes to pass. Certain Trolls or working brains, 
under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, 
Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, 
Brindley, Watt, Wedgewood, dwell in the troll- 
mounts of Britain and turn the sweat of their 
face to power and renown. 



78 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody 
landed on this spellbound island with impunity. 
The enchantments of barren shingle and rough 
weather transformed every adventurer into a la- 
borer. Each vagabond that arrived bent his neck 
to the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense for 
him. The strong survived, the weaker went to the 
ground. Even the pleasure -hunters and sots of 
England are of a tougher texture. A hard tem- 
perament had been formed by Saxon and Saxon- 
Dane, and such of these French or Normans as 
could reach it were naturalized in every sense. 

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon 
in England must be looked at as growths or ir- 
resistible offshoots of the expanding mind of the 
race. A man of that brain thinks and acts thus ; 
and his neighbor, being afflicted with the same 
kind of brain, though he is rich and called a baron 
or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is ready to 
allow the justice of the thought and act in his 
retainer or tenant, though sorely against his baro- 
nial or ducal will. 

The island was renowned in antiquity for its 
breed of mastiffs, so fierce that when their teeth 
were set you must cut their heads off to part them. 
The man was like his dog. The people have that 
nervous bilious temperament which is known by 
medical men to resist every means employed to 



ABILITY. 79 

make its possessor subservient to the will of others. 
The English game is main force to main force, the 
planting of foot to foot, fair play and open field, 

— a rough tug without trick or dodging, till one 
or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald spoke 
the language of his race when he planted himself 
at Winborne and said he " would do one of two 
things, or there live, or there lie." They hate 
craft and subtlety. They neither poison, nor way- 
lay, nor assassinate ; and when they have pounded 
each other to a poultice, they will shake hands and 
be friends for the remainder of their lives. 

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, 
at country fairs, at the hustings and in parliament. 
No artifice, no breach of truth and plain dealing, 

— not so much as secret ballot, is suffered in the 
island. In parliament, the tactics of the opposition 
is to resist every step of the government by a piti- 
less attack: and in a bargain, no prospect of ad- 
vantage is so dear to the merchant as the thought 
of being tricked is mortifying. 

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and 
James, who won the sea-fight of Scanderoon, was 
a model Englishman in his day. " His person was 
handsome and gigantic, he had so graceful elocu- 
tion and noble address, that, had he been dropt out 
of the clouds in any part of the world, he would 
have made himself respected : he was skilled in 



80 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

six tongues, and master of arts and arms." 1 Sir 
Kenelm wrote a book, " Of Bodies and of Souls," 
in which he propounds, that " syllogisms do breed 
or rather are all the variety of man's life. They 
are the steps by which we walk in all our busi- 
nesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but 
weave such chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving 
from this work, he doth as deficient from the na- 
ture of man : and, if he do aught beyond this, by 
breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions, 
he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked sequel of 
simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the 
bounds and the model of it." 2 

There spoke the genius of the English people. 
There is a necessity on them to be logical. They 
would hardly greet the good that did not logically 
fall, — as if it excluded their own merit, or shook 
their understandings. They are jealous of minds 
that have much facility of association, from an 
instinctive fear that the seeing many relations to 
their thought might impair this serial continuity 
and lucrative concentration. They are impatient 
of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation, 
and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of 
thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot 
count by their wonted rule. Neither do they 
reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism, 
1 Antony Wood. 2 Maris Souk, p. 29. 



ABILITY. 81 

For they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is 
a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar 
to boat ; the logic of cooks, carpenters and chemists, 
following the sequence of nature, and one on which 
words make no impression. Their mind is not daz- 
zled by its own means, but locked and bolted to 
results. They love men who, like Samuel John- 
son, a doctor in the schools, would jump out of his 
syllogism the instant his major proposition was in 
danger, to save that at all hazards. Their prac- 
tical vision is spacious, and they can hold many 
threads without entangling them. All the steps 
they orderly take ; but with the high logic of never 
confounding the minor and major proposition ; 
keeping their eye on their aim, in all the complicity 
and delay incident to the several series of means 
they employ. There is room in their minds for 
this and that, — a science of degrees. In the 
courts the independence of the judges and the 
loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. In 
Parliament they have hit on that capital inven- 
tion of freedom, a constitutional opposition. And 
when courts and parliament are both deaf, the 
plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon 
of defence from year to year is the obstinate repro- 
duction of the grievance, with calculations and es- 
timates. But, meantime, he is drawing numbers 
and money to his opinion, resolved that if all rem- 



82 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

edy fails, right of revolution is at the bottom of his 
charter-box. They are bound to see their measure 
carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat. 

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of 
justice enters, not so apparent in other races ; — a 
belief in the existence of two sides, and the resolu- 
tion to see fair play. There is on every question 
an appeal from the assertion of the parties to the 
proof of what is asserted. They kiss the dust be- 
fore a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a 
boxer in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, 
— the universe of Englishmen will suspend their 
judgment until the trial can be had. They are not 
to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a 
working machine, a working constitution, and will 
sit out the trial and abide by the issue and reject 
all preconceived theories. In politics they put 
blunt questions, which must be answered ; Who is 
to pay the taxes ? What will you do for trade ? 
What for corn ? What for the spinner ? 

This singular fairness and its results strike the 
French with surprise. Philip de Commines says, 
" Now, in my opinion, among all the sovereignties 
I know in the world, that in wdiich the public good 
is best attended to, and the least violence exercised 
on the people, is that of England." Life is safe, 
and personal rights ; and what is freedom without 
security? whilst, in France, "fraternity," "equal- 



ABILITY. 83 

ity," and " indivisible unity" are names for assassi- 
nation. Montesquieu said, "England is the freest 
country in the world. If a man in England had as 
many enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would 
happen to him." 

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and 
their realistic logic or coupling of means to ends, 
have given them the leadership of the modern 
world. Montesquieu said, "No people have true 
common-sense but those who are born in England." 
This common-sense is a perception of all the con- 
ditions of our earthly existence ; of laws that can 
be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or 
that are learned only by practice, in which allow- 
ance for friction is made. They are impious in 
their skepticism of theory, and in high departments 
they are cramped and sterile. But the uncondi- 
tional surrender to facts, and the choice of means 
to reach their ends, are as admirable as with ants 
and bees. 

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. 
They love the lever, the screw and pulley, the 
Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, 
tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear their 
freight ships. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, 
which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize 
that dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose 
poles turn themselves to the poles of the world 



8-4 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. 
Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. They 
are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse ; 
not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron- 
masters, colliers, wool - combers and tanners in 
Europe. They apply themselves to agriculture, 
to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea, 
wind, travelling sands, cold and wet sub-soil ; to 
fishery, to manufacture of indispensable staples, 
— salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery and 
brick, — to bees and silkworms ; — and by their 
steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer 
sits down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was 
wool on a sheep's back at sunrise. You dine with 
a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, 
poultry, mushrooms and pine-apples, all the growth 
of his estate. They are neat husbands for order- 
ing all their tools pertaining to house and field. 
Ail are well kept. There is no want and no waste. 
They study use and fitness in their building, in the 
order of their dwellings and in their dress. The 
Frenchman invented the ruffle ; the Englishman 
added the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible 
coat buttoned to the chin, of rough but solid and 
lasting texture. If he is a lord, he dresses a little 
worse than a commoner. They have diffused the 
taste for plain substantial hats, shoes and coats 
through Europe. They think him the best dressed 



ABILITY. 85 

man whose dress is so fit for his use that you can- 
not notice or remember to describe it. 

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their 
arts and manufactures. Every article of cutlery 
shows, in its shape, thought and long experience of 
workmen. They put the expense in the right 
place, as, in their sea-steamers, in the solidity of 
the machinery and the strength of the boat. The 
admirable equipment of their arctic ships carries 
London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts ; 
warm and ventilate houses. And they have im- 
pressed their directness and practical habit on mod- 
ern civilization. 

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody 
breaks who ought not to break; and that if he 
do not make trade every thing, it will make him 
nothing ; and acts on this belief. The spirit of 
system, attention to details, and the subordination 
of details, or the not driving things too finely, 
(which is charged on the Germans), constitute 
that despatch of business which makes the mercan- 
tile power of England. 

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. 
He is the opinion of Civilis, his German ancestor, 
whom Tacitus reports as holding that " the gods are 
on the side of the strongest ; " — a sentence which 
Bonaparte unconsciously translated, when he said 
that "he had noticed that Providence always fa- 



86 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

vorecl the heaviest battalion." Their military sci- 
ence propounds that if the weight of the advancing 
column is greater than that of the resisting, the 
latter is destroyed. Therefore Wellington, when 
he came to the army in Spain, had every man 
weighed, first with accoutrements, and then with- 
out ; believing that the force of an army depended 
on the weight and power of the individual sol- 
diers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told 
the House of Commons that more care is taken 
of the health and comfort of English troops than 
of any other troops in the world ; and that hence 
the English can put more men into the rank, on 
the day of action, on the field of battle, than any 
other army. Before the bombardment of the Da- 
nish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day after 
day, himself, in the boats, on the exhausting ser- 
vice of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's 
celebrated manoeuvre of breaking the line of sea- 
battle, and Nelson's feat of doitbling, or stationing 
his ships one on the outer bow, and another on 
the outer quarter of each of the enemy's, were only 
translations into naval tactics of Bonaparte's rule 
of concentration. Lord Collingwood was accus- 
tomed to tell his men that if they could fire three 
well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel 
could resist them ; and from constant practice they 
came to do it in three minutes and a half. 



ABILITY. 87 

But conscious that no race of better men exists, 
they rely most on the simplest means, and do not 
like ponderous and difficult tactics, but delight to 
bring the affair hand to hand ; where the victory 
lies with the strength, courage and endurance of the 
individual combatants. They adopt every improve- 
ment in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they funda- 
mentally believe that the best stratagem in naval 
war is to lay your ship close alongside of the ene- 
my's ship and bring all your guns to bear on him, 
until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old 
fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither 
in nor out of England. 

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious 
sentiment, and never any whim, that they will shed 
their blood for; but usually property, and right 
measured by property, that breeds revolution. They 
have no Indian taste for a tomahawk-dance, no 
French taste for a badge or a proclamation. The 
Englishman is peaceably minding his business and 
earning his day's wages. But if you offer to lay 
hand on his day's wages, on his cow, or his right in 
common, or his shop, he will fight to the Judg- 
ment. Magna - charta, jury -trial, habeas - corpus, 
star-chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth col- 
ony, American Revolution, are all questions involv- 
ing a yeoman's right to his dinner, and except as 
touching that, would not have lashed the British 
nation to rage and revolt, 



88 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of or- 
der and of calculation, it must be owned they are 
capable of larger views ; but the indulgence is ex- 
pensive to them, costs great crises, or accumulations 
of mental power. In common, the horse works best 
with blinders. Nothing is more in the line of Eng- 
lish thought than our unvarnished Connecticut ques- 
tion " Pray, sir, how do you get your living when 
you are at home ? " The questions of freedom, of 
taxation, of privilege, are money questions. Heavy 
fellows, steeped in beer and fleshpots, they are hard 
of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy minds 
need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics 
and persecution. They cannot well read a princi- 
ple, except by the light of fagots and of burning 
towns. 

Tacitus says of the Germans, " Powerful only in 
sudden efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor." 
This highly-destined race, if it had not somewhere 
added the chamber of patience to its brain, would 
not have built London. I know not from which of 
the tribes and temperaments that went to the com- 
position of the people this tenacity was supplied, 
but they clinch every nail they drive. They have 
no running for luck, and no immoderate speed. 
They spend largely on their fabric, and await the 
slow return. Their leather lies tanning seven years 
in the vat. At Rogers's mills, in Sheffield, where I 



ABILITY. 89 

was shown the process of making a razor and a pen- 
knife, I was told there is no hick in making good 
steel ; that they make no mistakes, every blade in 
the hundred and in the thousand is good. And 
that is characteristic of all their work, — no more 
is attempted than is done. 

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, 
he is told that " nobody is permitted to remain here, 
unless he understand some art, and excel in it all 
other men." The same question is still put to the 
posterity of Thor. A nation of laborers, every man 
is trained to some one art or detail and aims at per- 
fection in that; not content unless he has some- 
thing in which he thinks he surpasses all other men. 
He would rather not do any thing at all than not 
do it well. I suppose no people have such thor- 
oughness ; — from the highest to the lowest, every 
man meaning to be master of his art. 

" To show capacity," a Frenchman described as 
the end of a speech in debate : " No," said an Eng- 
lishman, " but to set your shoulder at the wheel, — 
to advance the business." Sir Samuel Komilly 
refused to speak in popular assemblies, confining 
himself to the House of Commons, where a meas- 
ure can be carried by a speech. The business of 
the House of Commons is conducted by a few per- 
sons, but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel 
" knew the Blue Books by heart." His colleagues 



90 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. The high 
civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, but posts 
which exact frightful amounts of mental labor. 
Many of the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Cas- 
tlereagh, Romilly, are soon worked to death. They 
are excellent judges in England of a good worker, 
and when they find one, like Clarendon, Sir Philip 
Warwick, Sir William Coventry, Ashley, Burke, 
Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or Russell, 
there is nothing too good or too high for him. 

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a 
public aim. Private persons exhibit, in scientific 
and antiquarian researches, the same pertinacity 
as the nation showed in the coalitions in which it 
yoked Europe against the empire of Bonaparte, 
one after the other defeated, and still renewed, 
until the sixth hurled him from his seat. 

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work 
of his father, who had made the catalogue of the 
stars of the northern hemisphere, expatriated him- 
self for years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished 
his inventory of the southern heaven, came home, 
and redacted it in eight years more ; — a work 
whose value does not begin until thirty years have 
elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages of 
the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the 
Arctic expeditions year after year, in search of 
Sir John Franklin, until at last they have threaded 



ABILITY. 91 

their way through polar pack and Behring's Straits 
and solved the geographical problem. Lord Elgin, 
at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek 
remains, set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epi- 
grams, and, after five years' labor to collect them, 
got his marbles on ship-board. The ship struck a 
rock and went to the bottom. He had them all 
fished up by divers, at a vast expense, and brought 
to London ; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli and 
Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were 
to be his applauders. In the same spirit, were the 
excavation and research by Sir Charles Fellowes 
for the Xanthian monument, and of Layard for 
his Nineveh sculptures. 

The nation sits in the immense city they have 
builded, a London extended into every man's mind, 
though he live in Van Dieman's Land or Cape- 
town. Faithful performance of what is undertaken 
to be performed, they honor in themselves, and ex- 
act in others, as certificate of equality with them- 
selves. The modern world is theirs. They have 
made and make it day by day. The commercial 
relations of the world are so intimately drawn in 
London, that every dollar on earth contributes to 
the strength of the English government. And if 
all the wealth in the planet should perish by war 
or deluge, they know themselves competent to re- 
place it. 



92 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their 
sea-going qualities; their descent from Odin's 
smiths, by their hereditary skill in working in iron ; 
their British birth, by husbandry and immense 
wheat harvests; and justified their occupancy of 
the centre of habitable land, by their supreme 
ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, 
builded, forged, spun and woven. They have made 
the island a thoroughfare, and London a shop, a 
law-court, a record-office and scientific bureau, in- 
viting to strangers; a sanctuary to refugees of 
every political and religious opinion ; and such a 
city that almost every active man, in any nation, 
finds himself at one time or other forced to visit it. 

In every path of practical activity they have 
gone even with the best. There is no secret of 
war in which they have not shown mastery. The 
steam-chamber of Watt, the locomotive of Ste- 
phenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, perform the 
labor of the world. There is no department of 
literature, of science, or of useful art, in which 
they have not produced a first-rate book. It is 
England whose opinion is waited for on the merit 
of a new invention, an improved science. And in 
the complications of the trade and politics of their 
vast empire, they have been equal to every exi- 
gency, with counsel and with conduct. Is it their 
luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain, — it 



ABILITY. 93 

is their commercial advantage that whatever light 
appears in better method or happy invention, 
breaks out in their race. They are a family to 
which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee has 
sworn that a male heir shall never be wanting. 
They have a wealth of men to fill important posts, 
and the vigilance of party criticism insures the se- 
lection of a competent person. 

A proof of the energy of the British people is 
the highly artificial construction of the whole fab- 
ric. The climate and geography, I said, were fac- 
titious, as if the hands of man had arranged the 
conditions. The same character pervades the 
whole kingdom. Bacon said, " Rome was a state 
not subject to paradoxes ; " but England subsists 
by antagonisms and contradictions. The founda- 
tions of its greatness are the rolling waves ; and 
from first to last it is a museum of anomalies. 
This foggy and rainy country furnishes the world 
with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do 
not afford water-power, but the land shakes under 
the thunder of the mills. There is no gold-mine 
of any importance, but there is more gold in 
England than in all other countries. It is too far 
north for the culture of the vine, but the wines of 
all countries are in its docks. The French Comte 
de Lauraguais said, " No fruit ripens in England 



9J: ENGLISH TRAITS. 

but a baked apple ; " but oranges and pine-apples 
are as clieap in London as in the Mediterranean. 
The Mark-Lane Express, or the Custom House Re- 
turns, bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope, — 

" Let India boast her palms, nor envy we 
The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree, 
While, by our oaks, those precious loads are borne, 
And realms commanded which those trees adorn." 

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full 
of artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell 
created sheep and cows and horses to order, and 
breeds in which every thing was omitted but what 
is economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag, 
the ox to his sirloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm- 
mills of the cattle, and converts the stable to a 
chemical factory. The rivers, lakes and ponds, too 
much fished, or obstructed by factories, are artifi- 
cially filled with the eggs of salmon, turbot and 
herring. 

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and 
Cambridgeshire are unhealthy and too barren to 
pay rent. By cylindrical tiles and guttapercha 
tubes, five millions of acres of bad land have been 
drained and put on equality with the best, for rape- 
culture and grass. The climate too, which was al- 
ready believed to have become milder and drier by 
the enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached 
by this new action, that fogs and storms are said to 



FACTITIOUS. 95 

disappear. In clue course, all England will be 
drained and rise a second time out of the waters. 
The latest step was to call in the aid of steam to 
agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman. I 
do not know but they will send him to Parliament 
next, to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, 
pounds, fans, and now he must pump, grind, dig 
and plough for the farmer. The markets created 
by the manufacturing population have erected agri- 
culture into a great thriving and spending indus- 
try. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to 
the value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds 
are cheaper than the natural resources. No man 
can afford to walk, when the parliamentary-train 
carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-burners are 
cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in the 
cities. All the houses in London buy their water. 
The English trade does not exist for the exporta- 
tion of native products, but on its manufactures, or 
the making well every thing which is ill-made else- 
where. They make ponchos for the Mexican, ban- 
dannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, 
beads for the Indian, laces for the Flemings, tele- 
scopes for astronomers, cannons for kings. 

The Board of Trade caused the best models of 
Greece and Italy to be placed within the reach of 
every manufacturing population. They caused to 
be translated from foreign languages and illustrated 



96 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

by elaborate drawings, the most approved works of 
Munich, Berlin and Paris. They have ransacked 
Italy to find new forms, to add a grace to the prod- 
ucts of their looms, their potteries and their foun- 
dries. 1 

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their 
social system. Their law is a network of fictions. 
Their property, a scrip or certificate of right to in- 
terest on money that no man ever saw. Their so- 
cial classes are made by statute. Their ratios of 
power and representation are historical and legal. 
The last Reform -bill took away political power 
from a mound, a ruin and a stone-wall, whilst Bir- 
mingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the 
wars of Europe, had no representative. Purity in 
the elective Parliament is secured by the purchase 
of seats. 2 Foreign power is kept by armed colo- 
nies ; power at home, by a standing army of police. 
The pauper lives better than the free laborer, the 
thief better than the pauper, and the transported 
felon better than the one under imprisonment. The 
crimes are factitious ; as smuggling, poaching, non- 
conformity, heresy and treason. The sovereignty 
of the seas is maintained by the impressment of 

1 See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1853. 

2 Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that 
the only independent mode of entering Parliament was to 
buy a seat, and he bought Horsham. 



FACTITIOUS. 97 

seamen. " The impressment of seamen," said Lord 
Eldon, " is the life of our navy." Solvency is 
maintained by means of a national debt, on the 
principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how 
can I pay you ? " For the administration of justice, 
Sir Samuel Romilly's expedient for clearing the 
arrears of business in Chancery was, the Chancel- 
lor's staying away entirely from his court. Their 
system of education is factitious. The Universi- 
ties galvanize dead languages into a semblance of 
life. Their church is artificial. The manners and 
customs of society are artificial ; — made-up men 
with made-up manners ; — and thus the whole is 
Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose ex- 
istence is a work of art ; — a cold, barren, almost 
arctic isle being made the most fruitful, luxurious 
and imperial land in the whole earth. 

Man in England submits to be a product of po- 
litical economy. On a bleak moor a mill is built, 
a banking-house is opened, and men come in as 
water in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. 
Man is made as a Birmingham button. The rapid 
doubling of the population dates from Watt's 
steam-engine. A landlord who owns a province, 
says " The tenantry are unprofitable ; let me have 
sheep." He unroofs the houses and ships the pop- 
ulation to America. The nation is accustomed to 
the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the 

VOL. v. 7 



98 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

maxim of their economists, " that the greater part 
in value of the wealth now existing in England has 
been produced by human hands within the last 
twelve months." Meantime, three or four days' 
rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London. 

One secret of their power is their mutual good 
understanding. Not only good minds are born 
among them, but all the people have good minds. 
Every nation has yielded some good wit, if, as has 
chanced to many tribes, only one. But the intel- 
lectual organization of the English admits a coni- 
municableness of knowledge and ideas among them 
all. An electric touch by any of their national 
ideas, melts them into one family and brings the 
hoards of power which their individuality is al- 
ways having, into use and play for all. Is it the 
smallness of the country, or is it the pride and af- 
fection of race, — they have solidarity, or responsi- 
bleness, and trust in each other. 

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is 
more lasting than the cloth. They embrace their 
cause with more tenacity than their life. Though 
not military, yet every common subject by the poll 
is fit to make a soldier of. These private, reserved, 
mute family-men can adopt a public end with all 
their heat, and this strength of affection makes the 
romance of their heroes. The difference of rank 



SOLIDARITY. 99 

does not divide the national heart. The Danish 
poet Oehlenschlager complains that who writes in 
Danish writes to two hundred readers. In Ger- 
many there is one speech for the learned, and an- 
other for the masses, to that extent that, it is said, 
no sentiment or phrase from the works of any 
great German writer is ever heard among the lower 
classes. But in England, the language of the noble 
is the language of the poor. In Parliament, in 
pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to 
thought and passion, the language becomes idio- 
matic ; the people in the street best understand 
the best words. And their language seems drawn 
from the Bible, the Common Law and the works of 
Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, 
Burns and Scott. The island has produced two 
or three of the greatest men that ever existed, but 
they were not solitary in their own time. Men 
quickly embodied what Newton found out, in 
Greenwich observatories and practical navigation. 
The boys know all that Hutton knew of strata, or 
Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels ; and 
these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So 
what is invented or known in agriculture, or in 
trade, or in war, or in art, or in literature and an- 
tiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few 
giants, but poured into the general mind, so that 
each of them could at a pinch stand in the shoes of 



100 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the other ; and they are more bound in character 
than differenced in ability or in rank. The laborer 
is a possible lord. The lord is a possible basket- 
maker. Every man carries the English system in 
his brain, knows what is confided to him and does 
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries 
England on his mace, the midshipman at the point 
of his dirk, the smith on his hammer, the cook 
in the bowl of his spoon ; the postilion cracks his 
whip for England, and the sailor times his oars to 
" God save the King ! " The very felons have their 
pride in each other's English stanchness. In poli- 
tics and in war they hold together as by hooks of 
steel. The charm in Nelson's history is the unself- 
ish greatness, the assurance of being supported to 
the uttermost by those whom he supports to the ut- 
termost. Whilst they are some ages ahead of the 
rest of the world in the art of living ; whilst in 
some directions they do not represent the modern 
spirit but constitute it ; — this vanguard of civility 
and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, 
lockstep, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, 
ten thousand deep. 



CHAPTER VI. 

MANNERS. 

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who 
stands firmest in his shoes. They have in them- 
selves what they value in their horses, — mettle 
and bottom. On the day of my arrival at Liver- 
pool, a gentleman, in describing to me the Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, " Lord 
Clarendon has pluck like a cock and will fight till 
he dies ; " and what I heard first I heard last, and 
the one thing the English value is pluck. The 
word is not beautiful, but on the quality they sig- 
nify by it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen 
have it ; the merchants have it ; the bishops have 
it ; the women have it ; the journals have it ; — 
the Times newspaper they say is the pluckiest 
thing in England, and Sydney Smith had made it 
a proverb that little Lord John Russell, the minis- 
ter, would take the command of the Channel fleet 
to-morrow. 

They require you to dare to be of your own 
opinion, and they hate the practical cowards who 
cannot in affairs answer directly yes or no. They 



102 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

dare to displease, nay, they will let you break all 
the commandments, if 3^011 do it natively and with 
spirit. You must be somebody ; then you may do 
this or that, as you will. 

Machinery has been applied to all work, and 
carried to such perfection that little is left for the 
men but to mind the engines and feed the furnaces. 
But the machines require punctual service, and as 
they never tire, they prove too much for their ten- 
ders. Mines, forges, mills, breweries, railroads, 
steam-pump, steam-plough, drill of regiments, drill 
of police, rule of court and shop-rule have operated 
to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and 
action of men. A terrible machine has possessed 
itself of the ground, the air, the men and women, 
and hardly even thought is free. 

The mechanical might and organization requires 
in the people constitution and answering spirits ; 
and he who goes among them must have some 
weight of metal. At last, you take your hint from 
the fury of life you find, and say, one thing is 
plain, this is no country for fainthearted people : 
don't creep about diffidently ; make up your mind ; 
take your own course, and you shall find respect 
and furtherance. 

It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel 
in Spain. I say as much of England, for other 
cause, simply on account of the vigor and brawn of 



MANNERS. 103 

the people. Nothing but the most serious business 
could give one any counterweight to these Bare- 
sarks, though they were only to order eggs and muf- 
fins for their breakfast. The Englishman speaks 
with all his body. His elocution is stomachic, — 
as the American's is labial. The Englishman is 
very petulant and precise about his accommodation 
at inns and on the roads ; a quiddle about his toast 
and his chop and every species of convenience, and 
loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience 
at any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself at all 
points, in his manners, in his respiration, and the 
inarticulate noises he makes in clearing the throat ; 
— all significant of burly strength. He has stam- 
ina ; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He 
has that aplomb which results from a good adjust- 
ment of the moral and physical nature and the 
obedience of all the powers to the will ; as if the 
axes of his eyes were united to his backbone, and 
only moved with the trunk. 

This vigor appears in the incuriosity and stony 
neglect, each of every other. Each man walks, 
eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in 
every manner acts and suffers without reference to 
the bystanders, in his own fashion, only careful not 
to interfere with them or annoy them ; not that he 
is trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbors, — 
he is really occupied with his own affair and does 



104 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

not think of them. Every man in this polished 
country consults only his convenience, as much as a 
solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I know not where 
any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and 
no man gives himself any concern with it. An 
Englishman walks in a pouring rain, swinging his 
closed umbrella like a walking-stick ; wears a wig, 
or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and 
no remark is made. And as he has been doing 
this for several generations, it is now in the blood. 
In short, every one of these islanders is an is- 
land himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a 
company of strangers you would think him deaf ; 
his eyes never wander from his table and news- 
paper. He is never betrayed into any curiosity or 
unbecoming emotion. They have all been trained 
in one severe school of manners, and never put 
off the harness. He does not give his hand. He 
does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an 
affront to look a man in the face without being in- 
troduced. In mixed or in select companies they 
do not introduce persons ; so that a presentation is 
a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introduc- 
tions are sacraments. He withholds his name. At 
the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper it to the 
clerk at the book-office. If he give you his pri- 
vate address on a card, it is like an avowal of 
friendship ; and his bearing, on being introduced, 



MANNERS. 105 

is cold, even though he is seeking yonr acquaint- 
ance and is studying how he shall serve you. 

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy, 
that in my lectures I hesitated to read and threw 
out for its impertinence many a disparaging phrase I 
which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor, i 
thin, unable mortals ; — so much had the fine phy- 
sique and the personal vigor of this robust race J 
worked on my imagination. 

I happened to arrive in England at the moment 
of a commercial crisis. But it was evident that 
let who will fail, England will not. These people 
have sat here a thousand years, and here will con- 
tinue to sit. They will not break up, or arrive at 
any desperate revolution, like their neighbors ; for 
they have as much energy, as much continence of 
character as they ever had. The power and pos- 
session which surround them are their own crea- 
tion, and they exert the same commanding industry 
at this moment. 

They are positive, methodical, cleanly and for- 
mal, loving routine and conventional ways ; loving 
truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on 
points of form. All the world praises the comfort 
and private appointments of an English inn, and 
of English households. You are sure of neatness 
and of personal decorum. A Frenchman may pos- 
sibly be clean ; an Englishman is conscientiously 



106 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

clean. A certain order and complete propriety is 
found in his dress and in his belongings. 

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps 
him in doors whenever he is at rest, and being of 
an affectionate and loyal temper, he dearly loves 
his house. If he is rich, he buys a demesne and 
builds a hall ; if he is in middle condition, he 
spares no expense on his house. Without, it is all 
planted ; within, it is wainscoted, carved, curtained, 
hung with pictures and filled with good furniture. 
'T is a passion which survives all others, to deck and 
improve it. Hither he brings all that is rare and 
costly, and with the national tendency to sit fast in 
the same spot for many generations, it comes to be, 
in the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts 
and trophies of the adventures and exploits of the 
family. He is very fond of silver plate, and though 
he have no gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he 
has of their punch-bowls and porringers. Incred- 
ible amounts of plate are found in good houses, 
and the poorest have some spoon or saucepan, gift 
of a godmother, saved out of better times. 

An English family consists of a few persons, 
who, from youth to age, are found revolving within 
a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible 
ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen 
attaching the two Siamese. England produces 
under favorable conditions of ease and culture the 



MANNERS. 107 

finest women in the world. And as the men are 
affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire 
and refine them. Nothing can be more delicate 
without being fantastical, nothing more firm and 
based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship 
and mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 
1596 says, "The wife of every Englishman is 
counted blest." The sentiment of Imogen in Cym- 
beline is copied from English nature ; and not less 
the Portia of Brutus, the Kate Percy and the Des- 
demona. The romance does not exceed the height 
of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, or in 
Lady Russell, or even as one discerns through the 
plain prose of Pepys's Diary, the sacred habit of an 
English wife. Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear 
the death of his wife. Every class has its noble 
and tender examples. 

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the 
nation to branch wide and high. The motive and 
end of their trade and empire is to guard the inde- 
pendence and privacy of their homes. Nothing so 
much marks their manners as the concentration on 
their household ties. This domesticity is carried 
into court and camp. Wellington governed India 
and Spain and his own troops, and fought battles, 
like a good family-man, paid his debts, and though 
general of an army in Spain, could not stir abroad 
for fear of public creditors. This taste for house 



108 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and parish merits lias of course its doting and fool- 
ish side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popular- 
ity of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact 
that he was wont to go to church every Sunday, 
with a large quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, 
his wife hanging on the other, and followed by a 
long brood of children. 

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, 
their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. The Mid- 
dle Ages still lurk in the streets of London. The 
Knights of the Bath take oath to defend injured 
ladies; the gold-stick-in-waiting survives. They 
repeated the ceremonies of the eleventh century in 
the coronation of the present Queen. A hereditary 
tenure is natural to them. Offices, farms trades 
and traditions descend so. Their leases run for a 
hundred and a thousand years. Terms of service 
and partnership are life-long, or are inherited. 
" Holdship has been with me," said Lord Eldon, 
" eight-and-twenty years, knows all my business and 
books." Antiquity of usage is sanction enough. 
Wordsworth says of the small freeholders of West- 
moreland, "Many of these humble sons of the hills 
had a consciousness that the land which they tilled 
had for more than five hundred years been possessed 
by men of the same name and blood." The ship- 
carpenter in the public yards, my lord's gardener 
and porter, have been there for more than a hun- 
dred years, grandfather, father, and son. 



MANNERS. 109 

The English power resides also in their dislike 
of change. They have difficulty in bringing their 
reason to act, and on all occasions use their mem- 
ory first. As soon as they have rid themselves of 
some grievance and settled the better practice, they 
make haste to fix it as a finality, and never wish 
to hear of alteration more. 

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor : 
his instinct is to search for a precedent. The fa- 
vorite phrase of their law is, "a custom whereof 
the memory of man runneth not back to the con- 
trary." The barons say, " Nolumus mutari ; " and 
.the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the foreigner on 
the reason of any practice with " Lord, sir, it was 
always so." They hate innovation. Bacon told 
them, Time was the right reformer ; Chatham, that 
" confidence was a plant of slow growth ; " Canning, 
to "advance with the times; " and Wellington, that 
"habit was ten times nature." All their states- 
men learn the irresistibility of the tide of custom, 
and have invented many fine phrases to cover this 
slowness of perception and prehensility of tail. 

A sea-shell shoidd be the crest of England, not 
only because it represents a power built on the 
waves, but also the hard finish of the men. The 
Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. 
After the spire and the spines are formed, or with 
the formation, a juice exudes and a hard enamel 



110 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

varnishes every part. The keeping of the propri- 
eties is as indispensable as clean linen. No merit 
quite countervails the want of this, whilst this some- 
times stands in lieu of all. " 'T is in bad taste," 
is the most formidable word an Englishman can 
pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There 
is a prose in certain Englishmen which exceeds in 
wooden deadness all rivalry with other countrymen. 
There is a knell in the conceit and externality of 
their voice, which seems to say, Leave all hope he- 
hind. In this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity 
gets intrenched and consolidated and founded in 
adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like one 
of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched 
with delicate engravings on thick hot-pressed pa- 
per, fit for the hands of ladies and princes, but with 
nothing in it worth reading or remembering. 

A severe decorum rules the court and the cot- 
tage. When Thalberg the pianist was one evening 
performing before the Queen at Windsor, in a pri- 
vate party, the Queen accompanied him with her 
voice. The circumstance took air, and all England 
shuddered from sea 4;o sea. The indecorum was 
never repeated. Cold, repressive manners prevail. 
No enthusiasm is permitted except at the opera. 
They avoid every thing marked. They require a 
tone of voice that excites no attention in the room. 
Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of 






MANNERS. Ill 

England, of whom Wotton said, " His wit was the 
measure of congruity." 

Pretension and vaporing are once for all dis- 
tasteful. They keep to the other extreme of low 
tone in dress and manners. They avoid pretension 
and go right to the heart of the thing. They hate 
nonsense, sentimentalism and highflown expres- 
sion ; they use a studied plainness. Even Brum- 
mel, their fop, was marked by the severest sim- 
plicity in dress. They value themselves on the 
absence of every thing theatrical in the public 
business, and on conciseness and going to the point, 
in private affairs. 

In an aristocratical country like England, not 
the Trial by Jury, but the dinner, is the capital 
institution. It is the mode of doing honor to a 
stranger, to invite him to eat, — and has been for 
many hundred years. " And they think," says the 
Venetian traveller of 1500, " no greater honor can 
be conferred or received, than to invite others to 
eat with them, or to be invited themselves, and 
they would sooner give five or six ducats to pro- 
vide an entertainment for a person, than a groat 
to assist him in any distress." 1 It is reserved to 
the end of the day, the family-hour being generally 
six, in London, and if any company is expected, 
one or two hours later. Every one dresses for din- 
1 Relation of England. Printed by the Camden Society. 



112 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ner, in his own house, or in another man's. The 
guests are expected to arrive within half an hour 
of the time fixed by card of invitation, and nothing 
but death or mutilation is permitted to detain them. 
The English dinner is precisely the model on which 
our own are constructed in the Atlantic cities. The 
company sit one or two hours before the ladies 
leave the table. The gentlemen remain over their 
wine an hour longer, and rejoin the ladies in the 
drawing-room and take coffee. The dress-dinner 
generates a talent of table-talk which reaches great 
perfection : the stories are so good that one is sure 
they must have been often told before, to have got 
such happy turns. Hither come all manner of 
clever projects, bits of popular science, of practical 
invention, of miscellaneous humor; political, liter- 
ary and personal news ; railroads, horses, diamonds, 
agriculture, horticulture, pisciculture and wine. 

English stories, hon - mots and the recorded ta- 
ble-talk of their wits, are as good as the best of the 
French. In America, we are apt scholars, but 
have not yet attained the same perfection : for the 
range of nations from which London draws, and 
the steep contrasts of condition, create the pictur- 
esque in society, as broken country makes pictur- 
esque landscape; whilst our prevailing equality 
makes a prairie tameness : and secondly, because 
the usage of a dress-dinner every day at dark has a 



MANNERS. 113 

tendency to hive and produce to advantage every- 
thing good. Much attrition has worn every sen- 
tence into a bullet. Also one meets now and then 
with polished men who know every thing, have 
tried every thing, and can do every thing, and are 
quite superior to letters and science. What could 
they not, if only they would ? 



CHAPTER VII. 

TRUTH. 

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness 
of heart, which contrasts with the Latin races. 
The German name has a proverbial significance of 
sincerity and honest meaning. The arts bear tes- 
timony to it. The faces of clergy and laity in old 
sculptures and illuminated missals are charged with 
earnest belief. Add to this hereditary rectitude 
the punctuality and precise dealing which com- 
merce creates, and you have the English truth and 
credit. The government strictly perforins its en- 
gagements. The subjects do not understand tri- 
fling on its part. When any breach of promise 
occurred, in the old days of prerogative, it was 
resented by the people as an intolerable grievance. 
And in modern times, any slipperiness in the gov- 
ernment of political faith, or any repudiation or 
crookedness in matters of finance, would bring the 
whole nation to a committee of inquiry and reform. 
Private men keep their promises, never so trivial. 
Down goes the flying word on the tablets, and is 
indelible as Domesday Book. 



TRUTH. 115 

Their practical power rests on their national sin- 
cerity. Veracity derives from instinct, and marks 
superiority in organization. Nature has endowed 
some animals with cunning, as a compensation for 
strength withheld ; but it has provoked the malice 
of all others, as if avengers of public wrong. In 
the nobler kinds, where strength could be afforded, 
her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the founda- 
tion of the social state. Beasts that make no truce 
with man, do not break faith with each other. 'T is 
said that the wolf, who makes a cache of his prey 
and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on 
digging, it is not found, is instantly and unresist- 
ingly torn in pieces. English veracity seems to 
result on a sounder animal structure, as if they 
could afford it. They are blunt in saying what 
they think, sparing of promises, and they require 
plain dealing of others. We will not have to do 
with a man in a mask. Let us know the truth. 
Draw a straight line, hit whom and where it will. 
Alfred, whom the affection of the nation makes the 
type of their race, is called by a writer at the Nor- 
man Conquest, the truth- sp eaher ; Alueredus verid- 
icus. Geoffrey of Monmouth says of King Aurelius, 
uncle of Arthur, that " above all things he hated a 
lie." The Northman Guttorm said to King Olaf, 
" It is royal work to fulfil royal words." The mot- 
toes of their families are monitory proverbs, as, 



116 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Farefac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes ; Say and 
seal, of the house of Fiennes ; Vero nil ve7*ius, of 
the DeVeres. To be king of their word is their 
pride. When they unmask cant, they say, " The 
English of this is," &c. ; and to give the lie is the 
extreme insult. The phrase of the lowest of the 
people is " honor-bright," and their vulgar praise, 
"His word is as good as his bond." They hate 
shuffling and equivocation, and the cause is dam- 
aged in the public opinion, on which any palter- 
ing can be fixed. Even Lord Chesterfield, with 
his French breeding, when he came to define a 
gentleman, declared that truth made his distinc- 
tion ; and nothing ever spoken by him would find 
so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke 
of Wellington, who had the best right to say so, 
advises the French General Kellermann that he 
may rely on the parole of an English officer. The 
English, of all classes, value themselves on this 
trait, as distinguishing them from the French, 
who, in the popular belief, are more polite than 
true. An Englishman understates, avoids the su- 
perlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging 
that in the French language one cannot speak with- 
out lying. 

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, 
and do not easily learn to make a show, and take 
the world as it goes. They are not fond of orna- 



TRUTH. 117 

ments, and if they wear them, they must be gems. 
They read gladly in old Fuller that a lady, in the 
reign of Elizabeth, "would have as patiently di- 
gested a lie, as the wearing of false stones or pen- 
dants of counterfeit pearl." They have the earth- 
hunger, or preference for property in land, which 
is said to mark the Teutonic nations. They build 
of stone : public and private buildings are massive 
and durable. In comparing their ships' houses 
and public offices with the American, it is com- 
monly said that they spend a pound where we 
spend a dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich 
equipage, plain rich finish throughout their house 
and belongings mark the English truth. 

They confide in each other, — English believes 
in English. The French feel the superiority of 
this probity. The Englishman is not springing a 
trap for his admiration, but is honestly minding his 
business. The Frenchman is vain. Madame de 
Stael says that the English irritated Napoleon, 
mainly because they have found out how to unite 
success with honesty. She was not aware how 
wide an application her foreign readers would give 
to the remark. Wellington discovered the ruin 
of Bonaparte's affairs, by his own probity. He 
augured ill of the empire, as soon as he saw that 
it was mendacious and lived by war. If war do 
not bring in its sequel new trade, better agricul- 



118 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ture and manufactures, but only games, fireworks 
and spectacles, — no prosperity could support it ; 
much less a nation decimated for conscripts and 
out of pocket, like France. So lie drudged for 
years on his military works at Lisbon, and from 
this base at last extended his gigantic lines to 
Waterloo, believing in his countrymen and their 
syllogisms above all the rhodomontade of Eu- 
rope. 

At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I 
happened to be a guest since my return home, I 
observed that the chairman complimented his com- 
patriots, by saying, " they confided that wherever 
they met an Englishman, they found a man who 
would speak the truth." And one cannot think 
this festival fruitless, if, all over the world, on the 
23d of April, wherever two or three English are 
found, they meet to encourage each other in the 
nationality of veracity. 

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in 
the lion's mouth, no men surpass them. On the 
king's birthday, when each bishop was expected to 
offer the king a purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry 
VIII. a copy of the Vulgate, with a mark at the 
passage, " Whoremongers and adulterers God will 
judge ; " and they so honor stoutness in each other 
that the king passed it over. They are tenacious 
of their belief and cannot easily change their opin- 



TRUTH. 119 

ions to suit the hour. They are like ships with too 
much head on to come quickly about, nor will pros- 
perity or even adversity be allowed to shake their 
habitual view of conduct. Whilst 1 was in Lon- 
don, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape from 
Paris, in February, 1848. Many private friends 
called on him. His name was immediately pro- 
posed as an honorary member of the Athenaeum. 
M. Guizot was blackballed. Certainly they knew 
the distinction of his name. But the Englishman 
is not fickle. He had really made up his mind now 
for years as he read his newspaper, to hate and de- 
spise M. Guizot; and the altered position of the 
man as an illustrious exile and a guest in the coun- 
try, makes no difference to him, as it would in- 
stantly to an American. 

They require the same adherence, thorough con- 
viction and reality, in public men. It is the want 
of character which makes the low reputation of the 
Irish members. " See them," they said, " one hun- 
dred and twenty-seven all voting like sheep, never 
proposing any thing, and all but four voting the 
income tax," — which was an ill-judged conces- 
sion of the government, relieving Irish property 
from the burdens charged on English. 

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of 
Parliament. The ruling passion of Englishmen in 
these days is a terror of humbug. In the same 



120 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

proportion they value honesty, stoutness, and ad- 
herence to your own. They like a man committed 
to his objects. They hate the French, as frivolous ; 
they hate the Irish, as aimless ; they hate the Ger- 
mans, as professors. In February 1848, they said, 
Look, the French king and his party fell for want 
of a shot ; they had not conscience to shoot, so 
entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy eaten 
out. 

They attack their own politicians every day, 
on the same grounds, as adventurers. They love 
stoutness in standing for your right, in declining 
money or promotion that costs auy concession. 
The barrister refuses the silk gown of Queen's 
Counsel, if his junior have it one day earlier. 
Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal for 
victory on 14th February, 1797, if he did not re- 
ceive one for victory on 1st June, 1794 ; and the 
long withholden medal was accorded. When Cas- 
tlereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington from going to 
the king's levee until the unpopular Cintra busi- 
ness had been explained, he replied, " You furnish 
me a reason for going. I will go to this, or I will 
never go to a king's levee." The radical mob at 
Oxford cried after the tory Lord Eldon, " There 's 
old Eldon ; cheer him ; he never ratted." They 
have given the parliamentary nickname of Trim- 



TRUTH. 121 

mers to the timeservers, whom English character 
does not love. 1 

They are very liable in their politics to extraor- 
dinary delusions ; thus to believe what stands re- 
corded in the gravest books, that the movement of 
10 April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners: 
which, to be sure, is paralleled by the democratic 
whimsy in this country which I have noticed to be 
shared by men sane on other points, that the Eng- 
lish are at the bottom of the agitation of slav- 
ery, in American politics : and then again by the 
French popular legends on the subject of perfidi- 
ous Albion. But suspicion will make fools of na- 
tions as of citizens. 

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and 
ready than other countrymen, and has given occa- 
sion to the observation that English wit comes 
afterwards, — which the French denote as esprit 
oTescalier. This dulness makes their attachment 

1 It is an unlucky moment to remember these sparkles of 
solitary virtue in the face of the honors lately paid in Eng- 
land to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am sure that no 
Englishman whom I had' the happiness to know, consented, 
when the aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like 
a Neapolitan rabble, before a successful thief. But, — how 
to resist one step, though odious, in a linked series of state 
necessities? Governments must always learn too late, that 
the use of dishonest agents is as ruinous for nations as for 
single men. 



122 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

to home and their adherence in all foreign coun- 
tries to home habits. The Englishman who visits 
Mount Etna will carry his teakettle to the top. 
The old Italian author of the " Relation of Eng- 
land " (in 1500), says, " I have it on the best in- 
formation, that, when the war is actually raging 
most furiously, they will seek for good eating and 
all their other comforts, without thinking what 
harm might befall them." Then their eyes seem 
to be set at the bottom of a tunnel, and they affirm 
the one small fact they know, with the best faith 
in the world that nothing else exists. And as their 
own belief in guineas is perfect, they readily, on all 
occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as final. 
Thus when the Rochester rappings began to be heard 
of in England, a man deposited <£100 in a sealed 
box in the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in the 
newspapers to all somnambulists, mesmerizers and 
others, that whoever could tell him the number of 
his note should have the money. He let it lie there 
six months, the newspapers now and then, at his 
instance, stimulating the attention of the adepts ; 
but none could ever tell him ; and he said, " Now 
let me never be bothered more with this proven 
lie." It is told of a good Sir John that he heard a 
case stated by counsel, and made up his mind ; then 
the counsel for the other side taking their turn to 
speak, he found himself so unsettled and perplexed 



TRUTH. 12& 

that lie exclaimed, " So help me God ! I will never 
listen to evidence again." Any number of delight- 
ful examples of this English stolidity are the anec- 
dotes of Europe. I knew a very worthy man, — a 
magistrate, I believe he was, in the town of Derby, 
— who went to the opera to see Malibran. In one 
scene, the heroine was to rush across a ruined 
bridge. Mr. B. arose and mildly yet firmly called 
the attention of the audience and the performers to 
the fact that, in his judgment, the bridge was un- 
safe ! This English stolidity contrasts with French 
wit and tact. The French, it is commonly said, 
have greatly more influence in Europe than the 
English. What influence the English have is by 
brute force of wealth and power ; that of the French 
by affinity and talent. The Italian is subtle, the 
Spaniard treacherous : tortures, it is said, could 
never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a 
secret. None of these traits belong to the English- 
man. His choler and conceit force every thing 
out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says 
of them, — 

" In close intrigue, their faculty 's but weak, 
For generally whate'er they know, they speak, 
And often their own counsels undermine 
By mere infirmity without design ; 
From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed, 
That English treasons never can succeed ; 
For they 're so open-hearted, you may know 
Their own most secret thoughts, and others' too. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHARACTER. 

The English race are reputed morose. I do not 
know that they have sadder brows than their neigh- 
bors of northern climates. They are sad by com- 
parison with the singing and dancing nations : not 
sadder, but slow and staid, as finding their joys at 
home. They, too, believe that where there is no 
enjoyment of life there can be no vigor and art in 
speech or thought ; that your merry heart goes all 
the way, your sad one tires in a mile. This trait 
of gloom has been fixed on them by French travel- 
lers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage, Mira- 
beau, down to the lively journalists of the feuille- 
tons, have spent their wit on the solemnity of their 
neighbors. The French say, gay conversation is 
unknown in their island. The Englishman finds 
no relief from reflection, except in reflection. 
When he wishes for amusement, he goes to work. 
His hilarity is like an attack of fever. Religion, 
the theatre and the reading the books of his coun- 
try all feed and increase his natural melancholy. 
The police does not interfere with public diversions. 



CHARACTER. 125 

It thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleas- 
ures and rare gayety of this inconsolable nation ; 
and their well-known courage is entirely attribu- 
table to their disgust of life. 

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their 
few words have obtained this reputation. As com- 
pared with the Americans, I think them cheerful 
and contented. Young people in this country are 
much more prone to melancholy. The English 
have a mild aspect and a ringing cheerful voice. 
They are large-natured and not so easily amused 
as the southerners, and are among them as grown 
people among children, requiring war, or trade, or 
engineering, or science, instead of frivolous games. 
They are proud and private, and even if disposed 
to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They 
sported sadly ; Us s'amusaient tristement, selon la 
coutmne, cle leur 2 :>a y s i sa id Froissart ; and I sup- 
pose never nation built their party-walls so thick, 
or their garden-fences so high. Meat and wine 
produce no effect on them. They are just as cold, 
quiet and composed, at the end, as at the beginning 
of dinner. 

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed 
for six or seven hundred years; and a kind of 
pride in bad public speaking is noted in the House 
of Commons, as if they were willing to show that 
they did not live by their tongues, or thought they 



126 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentle- 
men. In mixed company they shut their mouths. 
A Yorkshire mill-owner told me he had ridden 
more than once all the way from London to Leeds, 
in the first-class carriage, with the same persons, 
and no word exchanged. The club-houses were 
established to cidtivate social habits, and it is rare 
that more than two eat together, and oftenest one 
eats alone. Was it then a stroke of humor in the 
serious Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless 
logic, that made him shut up the English souls in 
a heaven by themselves ? 

They are contradictorily described as sour, sple- 
netic and stubborn, — and as mild, sweet and sen- 
sible. The truth is they have great range and 
variety of character. Commerce sends abroad 
multitudes of different classes. The choleric 
Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in 
the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect 
behavior of the educated and dignified man of 
family. So is the burly farmer ; so is the country 
squire, with his narrow and violent life. In every 
inn is the Commercial-Room, in which ' travellers,' 
or bagmen who carry patterns and solicit orders 
for the manufacturers, are wont to be entertained. 
It easily happens that this class should character- 
ize England to the foreigner, who meets them on 
the road and at every public house, whilst the gen- 



CHARACTER. 127 

try avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves whilst 
in them. 

But these classes are the right English stock, 
and may fairly show the national qualities, before 
yet art and education have dealt with them. They 
are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate 
admirers, and in all things very much steeped in 
their temperament, like men hardly awaked from 
deep sleep, which they enjoy. Their habits and 
instincts cleave to nature. They are of the earth, 
earthy ; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, attached 
to it for what it yields them, and not from any 
sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude 
exercise, butcher's meat and sound sleep ; and sus- 
pect any poetic insinuation or any hint for the con- 
duct of life which reflects on this animal existence, 
as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical 
cord and might stop their supplies. They doubt 
a man's sound judgment if he does not eat with 
appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly 
chaste. Take them as they come, you shall find 
in the common people a surly indifference, some- 
times gruffness and ill temper ; and in minds of 
more power, magazines of inexhaustible war, chal- 
lenging 

" The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring 
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland." 

They are headstrong believers and defenders of 



128 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

their opinion, and not less resolute in maintaining 
their whim and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward 
wrote a book against the Lord's Prayer. And 
one can believe that Burton, the Anatomist of 
Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the 
hour of his death, slipped the knot himself round 
his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope. 

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness : 
they have extreme difficulty to run away, and will 
die game. Wellington said of the young coxcombs 
of the Life-Guards, delicately brought up, "But 
the puppies fight well ; " and Nelson said of his 
sailors, " They really mind shot no more than 
peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation has more 
or better examples. They are good at storming 
redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last 
ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight 
and honor in it ; but not, I think, at enduring the 
rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping off a. 
castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being both vas- 
cular and highly organized, so as to be very sensi- 
ble of pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason 
and glory in a matter. 

Of that constitutional force which yields the sup- 
plies of the day, they have the more than enough ; 
the excess which creates courage on fortitude, genius 
in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in 
trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremo- 



CHARACTER. 129 

nies, petulance and projects in youth. The young 
men have a rude health which runs into peccant 
humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot 
expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, 
hunting, swimming and fencing, and run into absurd 
frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They 
stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the 
earth their turbulent sense ; leaving no lie uncon- 
tradicted ; no pretension unexamined. They chew 
hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; 
swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon 
Upas ; taste every poison ; buy every secret ; at 
Naples they put St. Januarius's blood in an alem- 
bic ; they saw a hole into the head of the " winking 
Virgin," to know why she winks ; measure with an 
English footrule every cell of the Inquisition, every 
Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies ; translate and 
send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied 
away from shuddering Bramins ; and measure their 
own strength by the terror they cause. These trav- 
ellers are of every class, the best and the worst; and 
it may easily happen that those of rudest behavior 
are taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon 
melancholy in the vulgar rich and poor appears as 
gushes of ill-humor, which every check exasperates 
into sarcasm and vituperation. There are multi- 
tudes of rude young English who have the self- 
sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, 



130 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

with their disdain of the rest of mankind and with 
this indigestion and choler, have made the English 
traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive 
manners. It was no bad description of the Briton 
generically, what was said two hundred years ago 
of one particular Oxford scholar : " He was a very 
bold man, uttered any thing that came into his 
mind, not only among his companions, but in pub- 
lic coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind 
of particular persons then accidentally present, 
without examining the company he was in; for 
which he was often reprimanded and several times 
threatened to be kicked and beaten." 

The common Englishman is prone to forget a 
cardinal article in the bill of social rights, that 
every man has a right to his own ears. No man 
can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of 
the audibilities of a public room, or to put upon 
the company with the loud statement of his crotch- 
ets or personalities. 

But it is in the deep traits of race that the for- 
tunes of nations are written, and however derived, 
— whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the 
air, or what circumstance that mixed for them the 
golden mean of temperament, — here exists the best 
stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, 
best for depth, range and equability ; men of aplomb 
and reserves, great range and many moods, strong 



CHARACTER. 131 

instincts, yet apt for culture ; war-class as well as 
clerks; earls and tradesmen; wise minority, as well 
as foolish majority ; abysmal temperament, hiding 
wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sunshine 
settles, alternated with a common sense and human- 
ity which hold them fast to every piece of cheerful 
duty ; making this temperament a sea to which all 
storms are superficial ; a race to which their fortunes 
flow, as if they alone had the elastic organization at 
once fine and robust enough for dominion ; as if 
the burly inexpressive, now mute and contumacious, 
now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon, which once 
made the island light with his fiery breath, had 
bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They 
hide virtues under vices, or the semblance of them. 
It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll again, 
who lifts the cart out of the mire, "threshes the 
corn that ten day -laborers could not end," but it is 
done in the dark and with muttered maledictions. 
Pie is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose 
speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to 
help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, 
and your thanks disgust him. Here was lately a 
cross-grained miser, odd and ugly, resembling in 
countenance the portrait of Punch with the laugh 
left out ; rich by his own industry ; sulking in a 
lonely house ; who never gave a dinner to any man 
and disdained all courtesies ; yet as true a wor- 



132 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

shipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, 
and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his 
countrymen creations of grace and truth, removing 
the reproach of sterility from English art, catching 
from their savage climate every fine hint, and im- 
porting into their galleries every tint and trait of 
sunnier cities and skies ; making an era in paint- 
ing ; and when he saw that the splendor of one of 
his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival's 
that hung next it, secretly took a brush and black- 
ened his own. 

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for 
daws to peck at. They have that phlegm or staid- 
ness which it is a compliment to disturb. " Great 
men," said Aristotle, " are always of a nature 
originally melancholy." 'Tis the habit of a mind 
which attaches to abstractions with a passion which 
gives vast results. They dare to displease, they do 
not speak to expectation. They like the sayers of 
No, better than the sayers of Yes. Each of them 
has an opinion which he feels it becomes him to 
express all the more that it differs from yours. 
They are meditating opposition. This gravity is 
inseparable from minds of great resources. 

There is an English hero superior to the French, 
the German, the Italian, or the Greek. When he 
is brought to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a 
richer material possession, and on more purely 



CHARACTER. 133 

metaphysical grounds. He is there with his own 
consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. 
On deliberate choice and from grounds of charac- 
ter, he has elected his part to live and die for, and 
dies with grandeur. This race has added new ele- 
ments to humanity and has a deeper root in the 
world. 

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to 
exquisite refinement. With larger scale, they have 
great retrieving power. After running each ten- 
dency to an extreme, they try another tack with 
equal heat. More intellectual than other races, 
when they live with other races they do not take 
their language, but bestow their own. They sub- 
sidize other nations, and are not subsidized. They 
proselyte, and are not proselyted. They assimilate 
other races to themselves, and are not assimilated. 
The English did not calculate the conquest of the 
Indies. It fell to their character. So they ad- 
minister, in different parts of the world, the codes 
of every empire and race ; in Canada, old French 
law ; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoleon ; in the 
West Indies, the edicts of the Spanish Cortes ; in 
the East Indies, the Laws of Menu ; in the Isle of 
Man, of the Scandinavian Thing ; at the Cape of 
Good Hope, of the old Netherlands ; and in the 
Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian. 

They are very conscious of their advantageous 



134 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

position in history. England is the lawgiver, the 
patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare the tone 
of the French and of the English press : the first 
querulous, captious, sensitive about English opin- 
ion ; the English press never timorous about French 
opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous. 

They are testy and headstrong through an ex- 
cess of will and bias ; churlish as men sometimes 
please to be who do not forget a debt, who ask no 
favors and who will do what they like with their 
own. With education and intercourse, these asper- 
ities wear off and leave the good-will pure. If 
anatomy is reformed according to national tenden- 
cies, I suppose the spleen will hereafter be found in 
the Englishman, not found in the American, and 
differencing the one from the other. I anticipate 
another anatomical discovery, that this organ will 
be found to be cortical and caducous ; that they 
are superficially morose, but at last tender-hearted, 
herein differing from Rome and the Latin nations. 
Nothing savage, nothing mean resides in the Eng- 
lish heart. They are subject to panics of credu- 
lity and of rage, but the temper of the nation, 
however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, as, 
in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever 
storms clears again, and serenity is its normal con- 
dition. 

A saving stupidity masks and protects their per- 



CHARACTER. 135 

ception, as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our 
swifter Americans, when they first deal with Eng- 
lish, pronounce them stupid ; but, later, do them 
justice as people who wear well, or hide their 
strength. To understand the power of performance 
that is in their finest wits, in the patient Newton, 
or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the 
Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons and Peels, 
one should see how English day-laborers hold out. 
High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. 
There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if 
they had oil also for their mental wheels and could 
perform vast amounts of work without damaging 
themselves. 

Even the scale of expense on which people live, 
and to which scholars and professional men con- 
form, proves the tension of their muscle, when vast 
numbers are found who can each lift this enormous 
load. I might even add, their daily feasts argue a 
savage vigor of body. 

No nation was ever so rich in able men ; " Gen- 
tlemen," as Charles I. said of Strafford, " whose 
abilities might make a prince rather afraid than 
ashamed in the greatest affairs of state ; " men of 
such temper, that, like Baron Vere, " had one seen 
him returning from a victory, he would by his si- 
lence have suspected that he had lost the day ; and, 
had he beheld him in a retreat, he would have col- 



136 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

lected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his 
spirit." 2 

The following passage from the " Heimskringla " 
might almost stand as a portrait of the modern 
Englishman : — " Haldor was very stout and strong 
and remarkably handsome in appearances. King 
Harold gave him this testimony, that he, among 
all his men, cared least about doubtful circum- 
stances, whether they betokened danger or pleas- 
ure ; for, whatever turned up, he was never in 
higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor 
more on account of them, nor ate nor drank but 
according to his custom. Haldor was not a man 
of many words, but short in conversation, told his 
opinion bluntly and was obstinate and hard : and 
this could not please the king, who had many 
clever people about him, zealous in his service. 
Haldor remained a short time with the king, and 
then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode 
in Hiardaholt and dwelt in that farm to a very 
advanced age." 2 

The national temper, in the civil history, is not 
flashy or whiffling. The slow, deep English mass 
smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its bor- 
ders in flame. The wrath of London is not French 
wrath, but has a long memory, and, in its hottest 
heat, a register and rule. 

1 Fuller, Worthies of England. 

2 Heimskringla, Laing's translation, vol. iii. p. 37. 



CHARACTER. 137 

Half their strength they put not forth. They 
are capable of a sublime resolution, and if here- 
after the war of races, often predicted, and making 
itself a war of opinions also (a question of des- 
potism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), 
should menace the English civilization, these sea- 
kings may take once again to their floating castles 
and find a new home and a second millennium of 
power in their colonies. 

The stability of England is the security of the 
modern world. If the English race were as mu- 
table as the French, what reliance? But the Eng- 
lish stand for liberty. The conservative, money- 
loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty-loving ; 
and so freedom is safe : for they have more per- 
sonal force than any other people. The nation al- 
ways resist the immoral action of their government. 
They think humanely on the affairs of France, of 
Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Hol- 
stein, though overborne by the statecraft of the 
rulers at last. 

Does the early history of each tribe show the 
permanent bias, which, though not less potent, is 
masked as the tribe spreads its activity into col- 
onies, commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early 
history shows it, as the musician plays the air which 
he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of variations. 
In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the 



138 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

genius of the English society, namely that private 
life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and 
ambition, words familiar to the longitude of Paris, 
are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson wrote 
from their hearts his homely telegraph, " England 
expects every man to do his duty." 

For actual service, for the dignity of a profes- 
sion, or to appease diseased or inflamed talent, the 
army and navy may be entered (the worst boys do- 
ing well in the navy) ; and the civil service in de- 
partments where serious official work is done ; and 
they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the 
severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound 
and most British Briton shrinks from public life 
as charlatanism, and respects an economy founded 
on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures or trade, 
which secures an independence through the creation 
of real values. 

They wish neither to command nor obey, but to 
be kings in their own houses. They are intellect- 
ual and deeply enjoy literature; they like well to 
have the world served up to them in books, maps, 
models, and every mode of exact information, and, 
though not creators in art, they value its refine- 
ment. They are ready for leisure, can direct and 
fill their own day, nor need so much as others the 
constraint of a necessity. But the history of the 
nation discloses, at every turn, this original precli- 



CHARACTER. 139 

lection for private independence, and however this 
inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes 
with which their vast colonial power has warped 
men out of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms 
and reforms the laws, letters, manners and occupa- 
tions. They choose that welfare which is compat- 
ible with the commonwealth, knowing that such 
alone is stable ; as wise merchants prefer invest- 
ments in the three per cents. 



CHAPTER IX. 

COCKAYNE. 

The English are a nation of humorists. Indi- 
vidual right is pushed to the uttermost bound com- 
patible with public order. Property is so perfect 
that it seems the craft of that race, and not to exist 
elsewhere. The king cannot step on an acre which 
the peasant refuses to sell. A testator endows a 
dog or a rookery, and Europe cannot interfere with 
his absurdity. Every individual has his particular 
way of living, which he pushes to folly, and the 
decided sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to 
back up Mr. Crump's whim by statutes and chan- 
cellors and horse -guards. There is no freak so 
ridiculous but some Englishman has attempted to 
immortalize by money and law. British citizen- 
ship is as omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cock- 
ayne is very sensible of this. The pursy man means 
by freedom the right to do as he pleases, and does 
wrong in order to feel his freedom, and makes a 
conscience of persisting in it. 

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so 
small. His confidence in the power and perform- 



COCKAYNE. 141 

ance of his nation makes him provokingly incu- 
rious about other nations. He dislikes foreigners. 
Swedenborg, who lived much in England, notes 
" the similitude of minds among the English, in 
consequence of which they contract familiarity with 
friends who are of that nation, and seldom with 
others; and they regard foreigners as one look- 
ing through a telescope from the top of a palace 
regards those who dwell or wander about out of 
the city." A much older traveller, the Venetian 
who wrote the " Kelation of England," 1 in 1500, 
says : — " The English are great lovers of them- 
selves and of every thing belonging to them. They 
think that there are no other men than themselves 
and no other world but England ; and whenever 
they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he 
looks like an Englishman and it is a great pity 
he should not be an Englishman ; and whenever 
they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner, they 
ask him whether such a thing is made in his coun- 
try." When he adds epithets of praise, his climax 
is, u So English ; " and when he wishes to pay you 
the highest compliment, he says, I should not know 
you from an Englishman. France is, by its nat- 
ural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which Eng- 
lish character draws its own traits in chalk. This 
arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions to 
1 Printed by the Camden Society. 



142 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the French. I suppose that all men of English 
blood in America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret 
feeling of joy that they are not French natives. 
Mr. Coleridge is said to have given public thanks 
to God, at the close of a lecture, that he had de- 
fended him from being able to utter a single sen- 
tence in the French language. I have found that 
Englishmen have such a good opinion of England, 
that the ordinary phrases in all good society, of 
postponing or disparaging one's own things in talk- 
ing with a stranger, are seriously mistaken by them 
for an insuppressible homage to the merits of their 
nation ; and the New Yorker or Pennsylvanian 
who modestly laments the disadvantage of a new 
country, log-huts and savages, is surprised by the 
instant and unfeigned commiseration of the whole 
company, who plainly account all the world out of 
England a heap of rubbish. 

The same insular limitation pinches his foreign 
politics. He sticks to his traditions and usages, 
and, so help him God ! he will force his island by- 
laws down the throat of great countries, like India, 
China, Canada, Australia, and not only so, but 
impose Wapping on the Congress of Vienna and 
trample down all nationalities with his taxed boots. 
Lord Chatham goes for liberty and no taxation 
without representation ; — for that is British law ; 
but not a hobnail shall they dare make in Amer- 



COCKAYNE. 148 

fca, but buy their hails in England ; — for that 
also is British law ; and the fact that British com- 
merce was to be re-created by the independence of 
America, took them all by surprise. 

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so 
rank and aggressive as to be a little incompatible 
with every other. The world is not wide enough 
for two. 

But beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, 
the island offers a daily worship to the old Norse 
god Brage, celebrated among our Scandinavian 
forefathers for his eloquence and majestic air. The 
English have a steady courage that fits them for 
great attempts . and endurance : they have also a 
petty courage, through which every man delights 
in showing himself for what he is and in doing 
what he can ; so that in all companies, each of 
them has too good an opinion of himself to imitate 
any body. He hides no defect of his form, fea- 
tures, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks 
every circumstance belonging to him comes recom- 
mended to you. If one of them have a bald, or a 
red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a scar, or 
mark, or a paunch, or a squeaking or a raven voice, 
he has persuaded himself that there is something 
modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on 
him. 

But nature makes nothing in vain, and this little 



144 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

superfluity of self-regard in the English brain is 
one of the secrets of their power and history. It 
sets every man on being and doing what he really 
is and can. It takes away a dodging, skulking, 
secondary air, and encourages a frank and manly 
bearing, so that each man makes the most of him- 
self and loses no opportunity for want of pushing. 
A man's personal defects will commonly have, with 
the rest of the world, precisely that importance 
which they have to himself. If he makes light of 
them, so will other men. We all find in these a 
convenient meter of character, since a little man 
would be ruined by the vexation. I remember a 
shrewd politician, in one of our western cities, told 
me that " he had known several successful states- 
men made by their foible." And another, an ex- 
governor of Illinois, said to me, " If the man knew 
anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest ; 
but he is such an ignorant peacock that he goes 
bustling up and down and hits on extraordinary 
discoveries." 

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker 
is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor 
him by all means, draw it all out and hold him to 
it. Their culture generally enables the travelled 
English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this 
self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air. Then 
the natural disposition is fostered by the respect 



COCKAYNE. 145 

which they find entertained in the world for Eng- 
lish ability. It was said of Louis XIV., that his 
gait and air were becoming enough in so great a 
monarch, yet would have been ridiculous in another 
man ; so the prestige of the English name warrants 
a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or 
Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel 
themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordi- 
nary tone on the subject of English merits. 

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a Ger- 
man speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, 
" No, we are not foreigners ; we are English ; it is 
you that are foreigners." They tell you daily in 
London the story of the Frenchman and English- 
man who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to fight, 
but their companions put them up to it ; at last it 
was agreed that they should fight alone, in the 
dark, and with pistols : the candles were put out, 
and the Englishman, to make sure not to hit any 
body, fired up the chimney, — and brought down 
the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about for- 
eigners, and answer any information you may vol- 
unteer with " Oh, Oh ! " until the informant makes 
up his mind that they shall die in their ignorance, 
for any help he will offer. There are really no 
limits to this conceit, though brighter men among 
them make painful efforts to be candid. 

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from 

vol. v. 10 



146 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the "Times" newspaper through politicians and 
poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill and Syd- 
ney Smith, down to the boys of Eton. In the 
gravest treatise on political economy, in a philo- 
sophical essay, in books of science, one is surprised 
by the most innocent exhibition of unflinching na- 
tionality. In a tract on Corn, a most amiable and 
accomplished gentleman writes thus : — " Though 
Britain, according to Bishop Berkeley's idea, were 
surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand cubits 
in height, still she would as far excel the rest of 
the globe in riches, as she now does both in this 
secondary quality and in the more important ones 
of freedom, virtue and science." l 

The English dislike the American structure of 
society, whilst yet trade, mills, public education 
and Chartism are doing what they can to create in 
England the same social condition. America is 
the paradise of the economists ; is the favorable 
exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin ; 
but when he speaks directly of the Americans the 
islander forgets his philosophy and remembers his 
disparaging anecdotes. 

But this childish patriotism costs something, like 
all narrowness. The English sway of their colo- 
nies has no root of kindness. They govern by 
their arts and ability; they are more just than 
1 William Speuce. 



COCKAYNE. 147 

kind : and whenever an abatement of their power 
is felt, they have not conciliated the affection on 
which to rely. 

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, 
province, or town, are nsefnl in the absence of real 
ones ; but we must not insist on these accidental 
lines. Individual traits are always triumphing 
over national ones. There is no fence in meta- 
physics discriminating Greek, or English, or Span- 
ish science. iEsop and Montaigne, Cervantes and 
Saadi are men of the world ; and to wave our own 
flag at the dinner table or in the University is to 
carry the boisterous dulness of a fire-club into a 
polite circle. Nature and destiny are always on 
the watch for our follies. Nature trips us up when 
we strut ; and there are curious examples in his- 
tory on this very point of national pride. 

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in 
Cilicia, was a low parasite who got a lucrative con- 
tract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and 
informer, he got rich and was forced to run from 
justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, 
collected a library, and got promoted by a faction 
to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Jul- 
ian came, A. D. 361, George was dragged to pris- 
on ; the prison was burst open by the mob and 
George was lynched, as he deserved. And this 
precious knave became, in good time, Saint George 



148 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory 
and civility and the pride of the best blood of the 
modern world. 

Strange, that the solid truth - speaking Briton 
should derive from an impostor. Strange, that the 
New World should have no better luck, — that 
broad America must wear the name of a thief. 
Amerigo Vespucci, the pickledealer at Seville, who 
went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and 
whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in 
an expedition that never sailed, managed in this 
lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half 
the earth with his own dishonest name. Thus no- 
body can throw stones. We are equally badly off 
in our founders ; and the false pickledealer is an 
offset to the false bacon-seller. 



CHAPTER X. 

WEALTH. 

These is no country in which so absolute a hom- 
age is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch 
of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of 
large property, as if after all it needed apology. 
But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, 
and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic 
rules throughout all English souls ; — if you have 
merit, can you not show it by your good clothes 
and coach and horses ? How can a man be a gen- 
tleman without a pipe of wine ? Haydon says, 
" TJhere is a fierce resolution to make every man 
live according to the means he possesses." There 
is a mixture of religion in it. They are under the 
Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that 
their days shall be long in the land, they shall have 
sons and daughters, flocks and herds, wine and oil. 
In exact proportion is the reproach of poverty. 
They do not wish to be represented except by opu- 
lent men. An Englishman who has lost his for- 
tune is said to have died of a broken heart. The 
last term of insult is, " a beggar." Nelson said, 



150 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

" The want of fortune is a crime which I can never 
get over." Sydney Smith said, " Poverty is infa- 
mous in England." And one of their recent writ- 
ers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic 
life, of "the grave moral deterioration which fol- 
lows an empty exchequer." You shall find this 
sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet deeply implied 
in the novels and romances of the present century, 
and not only in these, but in biography and in the 
votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preach- 
ing and in the table-talk. 

I was lately turning over Wood's Athence Ox- 
onienses, and looking naturally for another stand- 
ard in a chronicle of the scholars of Oxford for 
two hundred years. But I found the two disgraces 
in that, as in most English books, are, first, dis- 
loyalty to Church and State, and second, to be 
born poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit 
of England is the brutal political economy. Mal- 
thus finds no cover laid at nature's table for the 
laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament 
expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller in 
the House of Commons, " If you do not like the 
country, damn you, you can leave it." When Sir 
S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish offi- 
cers to bind children apprentices at a greater dis- 
tance than forty miles from their home, Peel op- 
posed, and Mr. Wortley said, "though, in the 



WEALTH. 151 

higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a 
good thing, it was not so among the lower orders. 
Better take them away from those who might de- 
prave them. And it was highly injurious to trade 
to stop binding to manufacturers, as it must raise 
the price of labor and of manufactured goods." 

The respect for truth of facts in England is 
equalled only by the respect for wealth. It is at 
once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he is a 
wealth-maker, and his passion for independence. 
The Englishman believes that every man must take 
care of himself, and has himself to thank if he do 
not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their 
national point of honor. From the Exchequer and 
the East India House to the huckster's shop, every 
thing prospers because it is solvent. The British 
armies are solvent and pay for what they take. 
The British empire is solvent ; for in spite of the 
huge national debt, the valuation mounts. During 
the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst they complained 
that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, 
and by dint of enormous taxes were subsidizing 
all the continent against France, the English were 
growing rich every year faster than any people 
ever grew before. It is their maxim that the 
weight of taxes must be calculated, not by what 
is taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in the 
ideas and mechanism of an Englishman. The 



152 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it 
pays ; no matter how much convenience, beauty, 
or eclat, it must be self-supporting. They are con- 
tented with slower steamers, as long as they know 
that swifter boats lose money. They proceed log- 
ically by the double method of labor and thrift. 
Every household exhibits an exact economy, and 
nothing of that uncalculated headlong expenditure 
which families use in America. If they cannot 
pay, they do not buy ; for they have no presump- 
tion of better fortunes next year, as our people 
have ; and they say without shame, I cannot afford 
it. Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second- 
class cars, or in the second cabin. An economist, 
or a man who can proportion his means and his am- 
bition, or bring the year round with expenditure 
which expresses his character without embarrassing 
one day of his future, is already a master of life, 
and a freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son 
that " one ought never to devote more than two 
thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of 
life, since the extraordinary will be certain to ab- 
sorb the other third." 

The ambition to create value evokes every kind 
of ability; government becomes a manufacturing 
corporation, and every house a mill. The headlong 
bias to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin, — 
if possible will teach spiders to weave silk stock- 



WEALTH. 153 

ings. An Englishman, while he eats and drinks 
no more or not much more than another man, 
labors three times as many hours in the course of 
a year as another European ; or, his life as a work- 
man is three lives. He works fast. Every thing 
in England is at a quick pace. They have rein- 
forced their own productivity by the creation of 
that marvellous machinery which differences this 
age from any other age. 

It is a curious chapter in modern history, the 
growth of the machine-shop. Six hundred years 
ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the 
equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform 
of the calendar ; measured the length of the year ; 
invented gunpowder ; and announced (as if look- 
ing from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into 
ours), that " machines can be constructed to drive 
ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers 
could do; nor would they need anything but a 
pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be con- 
structed to move with an incredible speed, without \ 
the aid of any animal. Finally, it would not be 
impossible to make machines which by means of a 
suit of wings should fly in the air in the manner of. 
birds." But the secret slept with Bacon. The six 
hundred years have not yet fulfilled his words. 
Two centuries ago the sawing of timber was done 
by hand ; the carriage wheels ran on wooden axles ; 



154 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it 
was to little purpose that they had pit-coal, or that 
looms were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson 
had taught them to work force-pumps and power- 
looms by steam. The great strides were all taken 
within the last hundred years. The Life of Sir 
Robert Peel, in his day the model Englishman, 
very properly has, for a frontispiece, a drawing of 
the spinning-j enny, which wove the web of his for- 
tunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning-j enny, 
and died in a workhouse. Arkwright improved 
the invention, and the machine dispensed with the 
work of ninety-nine men ; that is, one spinner 
could do as much work as one hundred had done 
before. The loom was improved further. But the 
men would sometimes strike for wages and combine 
against the masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear 
was felt lest the trade would be drawn away by 
these interruptions and the emigration of the spin- 
ners to Belgium and the United States. Iron and 
steel are very obedient. Whether it were not pos- 
sible to make a spinner that would not rebel, nor 
mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor emi- 
^ grate ? At the solicitation of the masters, after a 
mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of 
Manchester undertook to create this peaceful fel- 
low, instead of the quarrelsome fellow God had 
made. After a few trials, he succeeded, and in 



WEALTH. 155 

1830 procured a patent for his self-acting mule ; a 
creation, the delight of mill-owners, and " destined," 
they said, " to restore order among the industrious 
classes ; " a machine requiring only a child's hand 
to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright had 
destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed 
the factory spinner. The power of machinery in 
Great Britain, in mills, has been computed to be 
equal to 600,000,000 men, one man being able by 
the aid of steam to do the work which required two 
hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years 
ago. The production has been commensurate. 
England already had this laborious race, rich soil, 
water, wood, coal, iron and favorable climate. 
Eight hundred years ago commerce had made it 
rich, and it was recorded, " England is the richest 
of all the northern nations." The Norman histo- 
rians recite that " in 1067, William carried with 
him into Normandy, from England, more gold and 
silver then had ever before been seen in Gaul." 
But when, to this labor and trade and these native 
resources was added this goblin of steam, with his 
myriad arms, never tired, working night and day 
everlastingly, the amassing of property has run out 
of all figures. It makes the motor of the last 
ninety years. The steampipe has added to her 
population and wealth the equivalent of four or 
five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered 



156 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

in Lloyd's lists. The yield of wheat has gone on 
from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the Stuarts, 
to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand million of 
pounds sterling are said to compose the floating 
money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell 
stated that the people of this country had laid out 
£300,000,000 of capital in railways, in the last 
four years. But a better measure than these 
sounding figures is the estimate that there is 
wealth enough in England to support the entire 
population in idleness for one year. 

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes 
chisels, roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth 
divides a bar to a millionth of an inch. Steam 
twines huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it 
braids straw, and vies with the volcanic forces 
which twisted the strata. It can clothe shingle 
mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that 
will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant 
forests, and bring rain after three thousand years. 
Already it is ruddering the balloon, and the next 
war will be fought in the air. But another machine 
more potent in England than steam is the Bank. 
It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated 
and cities rise ; it refuses loans, and emigration 
empties the country ; trade sinks ; revolutions break 
out ; kings are dethroned. By these new agents 
our social system is moulded. By dint of steam 



WEALTH. 157 

and of money, war and commerce are changed. 
Nations have lost their old omnipotence ; the pa- 
triotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obso- 
lete, we go and live where we will. Steam has 
enabled men to choose what law they will live 
under. Money makes place for them. The tele- 
graph is a limp band that will hold the Fenris- 
wolf of war. For now that a telegraph line runs 
through France and Europe from London, every 
message it transmits makes stronger by one thread 
the band which war will have to cut. 

The introduction of these elements gives new 
resources to existing proprietors. A sporting duke 
may fancy that the state depends on the House 
of Lords, but the engineer sees that every stroke 
of the steam-piston gives value to the duke's land, 
fills it with tenants ; doubles, quadruples, centuples 
the duke's capital, and creates new measures and 
new necessities for the culture of his children. 
Of course it draws the nobility into the competi- 
tion, as stock-holders in the mine, the canal, the 
railway, in the application of steam to agriculture, 
and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces 
large classes into the same competition ; the old 
energy of the Norse race arms itself with these 
magnificent powers ; new men prove an overmatch 
for the land-owner, and the mill buys out the 
castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once forged his 



158 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

bolts in icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely 
fiords, in England has advanced with the times, 
has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, sits down 
at a desk in the India House and lends Miollnir 
to Birmingham for a steam-hammer. 

The creation of wealth in England in the last 
ninety years is a main fact in modern history. 
The wealth of London determines prices all over 
the globe. All things precious, or useful, or amns- 
in<>\ or intoxicating, are sucked into this commerce 
and floated to London. Some English private for- 
tunes reach, and some exceed a million of dollars 
a year. A hundred thousand palaces adorn the 
island. All that can feed the senses and passions, 
all that can succor the talent or arm the hands of 
the intelligent middle class, who never spare in 
what they buy for their own consumption ; all that 
can aid science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, 
is in open market. Whatever is excellent and 
beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture, 
in fountain, garden, or grounds, — the English noble 
crosses sea and land to see and to copy at home. 
The taste and science of thirty peaceful genera- 
tions ; the gardens which Evelyn planted ; the tem- 
ples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and 
Christopher Wren built; the wood that Gibbons 
carved; the taste of foreign and domestic artists, 
Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, — are 



WEALTH. 159 

in the vast auction, and the hereditary principle 
heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit of ages 
of owners. The present possessors are to the full 
as absolute as any of their fathers in choosing 
and procuring what they like. This comfort and 
splendor, the breadth of lake and mountain, til- 
lage, pasture and park, sumptuous castle and mod- 
ern villa, — all consist with perfect order. They 
have no revolutions ; no horse-guards dictating to 
the crown ; no Parisian poissardes and barricades ; 
no mob : but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, 
wine and ale and beer and gin and sleep. 

With this power of creation and this passion for 
independence, property has reached an ideal per- 
fection. It is felt and treated as the national 
life-blood. The laws are framed to give property 
the securest possible basis, and the provisions to 
lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest 
heads in a profession which never admits a fool. 
The rights of property nothing but felony and 
treason can override. The house is a castle which 
the king cannot enter. The Bank is a strong box 
to which the king has no key. Whatever surly 
sweetness possession can give, is tasted in Eng- 
land to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things, 
and absolute possession gives the smallest free- 
holder identity of interest with the duke. High 
stone fences and padlocked garden-gates announce 



160 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the absolute will of the owner to be alone. Every 
whim of exaggerated egotism is put into stone and 
iron, into silver and gold, with costly deliberation 
and detail. 

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager 
wishes to establish some claim to put her park 
paling a rod forward into his grounds, so as to get 
a coachway and save her a mile to the avenue. 
Instantly he transforms his paling into stone-ma- 
sonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe 
cannot prevail on him to sell or compound for an 
inch of the land. They delight in a freak as the 
proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward 
Boynton, at Spic Park at Cadenham, on a preci- 
pice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a 
long barn, which had not a window on the prospect 
side. Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, Font- 
hill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and 
Newstead Abbey became one in the hands of Lord 
Byron. 

But the proudest result of this creation has been 
the great and refined forces it has put at the dis- 
posal of the private citizen. In the social world an 
Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king 
in a plain coat. He goes with the most powerful 
protection, keeps the best company, is armed by 
the best education, is seconded by wealth ; and his 
English name and accidents are like a flourish of 



WEALTH. 161 

trumpets announcing him. This, with his quiet 
style of manners, gives him the power of a sover- 
eign without the inconveniences which belong to 
that rank. I much prefer the condition of an Eng- 
lish gentleman of the better class to that of any 
potentate in Europe, — whether for travel, or for 
opportunity of society, or for access to means of 
science or study, or for mere comfort and easy 
healthy relation to people at home. 

Such as we have seen is the wealth of England ; 
a mighty mass, and made good in whatever details 
we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is 
the wealth of temperament in the people. The 
wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her 
worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as 
themselves ; each is a captain a hundred strong, 
and that wealth of men is represented again in the 
faculty of each individual, — that he has waste 
strength, power to spare. The English are so rich 
and seem to have established a tap-root in the 
bowels of the planet, because they are constitution- 
ally fertile and creative. 

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, 
if he would not have them rule him. Man is a 
shrewd inventor and is ever taking the hint of a 
new machine from his own structure, adapting some 
secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood and leather 
to some required function in the work of the world. 

vol. v. 11 



162 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

But it is found that the machine unmans the user. 
What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general 
power. There should be temperance in making 
cloth, as well as in eating. A man should not be 
a silk-worm, nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. 
The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to 
the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester 
spinner, — far on the way to be spiders and nee- 
dles. The incessant repetition of the same hand- 
work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit 
and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a buckle- 
maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a 
change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like 
ant-hills, when the fashion of shoe-strings super- 
sedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, 
or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are 
inclosed by landlords. Then society is admonished 
of the mischief of the division of labor, and that 
the best political economy is care and culture of 
men ; for in these crises all are ruined except such 
as are proper individuals, capable of thought and 
of new choice and the application of their talent to 
new labor. Then again come in new calamities. 
England is aghast at the disclosure of her fraud in 
the adulteration of food, of drugs and of almost 
every fabric in her mills and shops ; finding that 
milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread 
satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. 



WEALTH. 163 

In true England all is false and forged. This 
too is the reaction of machinery, but of the lar- 
ger machinery of commerce. 'T is not, I suppose, 
want of probity, so much as the tyranny of trade, 
which necessitates a perpetual competition of under- 
selling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of 
the fabric. 

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, 
unmanageable, and flies away with the aeronaut. 
Steam from the first hissed and screamed to warn 
him ; it was dreadful with its explosion, and crushed 
the engineer. The machinist has wrought and 
watched, engineers and firemen without number 
have been sacrificed in learning to tame and guide 
the monster. But harder still it has proved to 
resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper 
wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, 
Peel and Robinson and their Parliaments and their 
whole generation adopted false principles, and went 
to their graves in the belief that they were enriching 
the country which they were impoverishing. They 
congratulated each other on ruinous expedients. It 
is rare to find a merchant who knows why a crisis 
occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who 
knows the mischief of paper-money. In the cul- 
mination of national prosperity, in the annexation 
of countries ; building of ships, depots, towns ; in 
the influx of tons of gold and silver; amid the 



164 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it was found 
that bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman 
was forced to sell his cow and pig, his tools and 
his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer of 
the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. The 
poor-rate was sucking in the solvent classes and 
forcing an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What 
befalls from the violence of financial crises, befalls 
daily in the violence of artificial legislation. 

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, 
bounteous and augmenting. But the question re- 
curs, does she take the step beyond, namely to the 
wise use, in view of the supreme wealth of na- 
tions ? We estimate the wisdom of nations by see- 
ing what they did with their surplus capital. And, 
in view of these injuries, some compensation has 
been attempted in England. A part of the money 
earned returns to the brain to buy schools, libra- 
ries, bishops, astronomers, chemists and artists 
with ; and a part to repair the wrongs of this 
intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, 
Mechanics' Institutes, public grounds and other 
charities and amenities. But the antidotes are 
frightfully inadequate, and the evil requires a 
deeper cure, which time and a simpler social or- 
ganization must supply. At present she does not 
rule her wealth. She is simply a good England, 



WEALTH. 165 

but no divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She 
too is in the stream of fate, one victim more in a 
common catastrophe. 

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of 
greatness to be held as the chief offender. Eng- 
land must be held responsible for the despotism of 
expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so 
much manhood and talent and perseverance has 
thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument of 
materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of 
base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty 
and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the 
conquest of letters and arts ; when English success 
has grown out of the very renunciation of princi- 
ples, and the dedication to outsides ? A civility of 
trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sen- 
sation takes place, and the putting as many imped- 
iments as we can between the man and his ob- 
jects. Hardly the bravest among them have the 
manliness to resist it successfully. Hence it has 
come that not the aims of a manly life, but the 
means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is 
that which is to be considered by a youth in Eng- 
land emerging from his minority. A large family 
is reckoned a misfortune. And it is a consolation 
in the death of the young, that a source of expense 
is closed. 



CHAPTER XI. 

ARISTOCRACY. 

The feudal character of the English state, now 
that it is getting obsolete, glares a little, in con- 
trast with the democratic tendencies. The inequal- 
ity of power and property shocks republican nerves. 
Palaces, halls, villas, walled parks, all over Eng- 
land, rival the splendor of royal seats. Many of 
the halls, like Haddon or Kedleston, are beautiful 
desolations. The proprietor never saw them, or 
never lived in them. Primogeniture built these 
sumptuous piles, and I suppose it is the sentiment 
of every traveller, as it was mine, It was well to 
come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a 
cardinal rule of English property and institutions. 
Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and 
faces, affirm it. 

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of 
the people is loyal. The estates, names and man- 
ners of the nobles flatter the fancy of the people 
and conciliate the necessary support. In spite of 
broken faith, stolen charters and the devastation 
of society by the profligacy of the court, we take 



ARISTOCRACY. 167 

sides as we read for the loyal England and King- 
Charles's " return to his right " with his Cavaliers, 
— knowing what a heartless trifler he is, and what 
a crew of God-forsaken robbers they are. The 
people of England knew as much. But the fair 
idea of a settled government connecting itself with 
heraldic names, with the written and oral history 
of Europe, and, at last, with the Hebrew religion 
and the oldest traditions of the world, was too 
pleasing a vision to be shattered by a few offensive 
realities and the politics of shoe-makers and coster- 
mongers. The hopes of the commoners take the 
same direction with the interest of the patricians. 
Every man who becomes rich buys land and does 
what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he 
hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy are identified 
with the aristocracy. Time and law have made 
the joining and moulding perfect in every part. 
The Cathedrals, the Universities, the national mu- 
sic, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the 
heraldry which the current politics of the day are 
sapping. The taste of the people is conservative. 
They are proud of the castles, and of the language 
and symbol of chivalry. Even the word lord is 
the luckiest style that is used in any language to 
designate a patrician. The superior education and 
manners of the nobles recommend them to the 
country. 



168 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The Norwegian pirate got what he could and 
held it for his eldest son. The Norman noble, who 
was the Norwegian pirate baptized, did likewise. 
There was this advantage of Western over Oriental 
nobility, that this was recruited from below. Eng- 
lish history is aristocracy with the doors open. 
Who has courage and faculty, let him come in. Of 
course the terms of admission to this club are hard 
and high. The selfishness of the nobles comes in 
aid of the interest of the nation to require signal 
merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics 
and letters ; the war-lord to the law-lord ; the law- 
lord to the merchant and the mill-owner ; but the 
privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining 
it were changed. 

The foundations of these families lie deep in 
Norwegian exploits by sea and Saxon sturdiness 
on land. All nobility in its beginnings was some- 
body's natural superiority. The things these Eng- 
lish have done were not done without peril of life, 
nor without wisdom and conduct ; and the first 
hands, it may be presumed, were often challenged 
to show their right to their honors, or yield them to 
better men. " He that will be a head, let him be 
a bridge," said the Welsh chief Benegridran, when 
he carried all his men over the river on his back. 
" He shall have the book," said the mother of Al- 
fred, "who can read it; " and Alfred won it by that 



ARISTOCRACY. 169 

title : and I make no doubt that feudal tenure was 
no sinecure, but baron, knight and tenant often had 
their memories refreshed, in regard to the service 
by which they held their lands. The De Yeres, 
Bohuns, Mowbrays and Plantagenets were not ad- 
dicted to contemplation. The Middle Age adorned 
itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of 
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor 
told Henry V. that no Christian king had such an- 
other knight for wisdom, nurture and manhood, 
and caused him to be named, " Father of curtesie." 
" Our success in France," says the historian, " lived 
and died with him." 1 

The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation 
of land was large, as long as it brought the duty 
of protecting it, hour by hour, against a terrible 
enemy. In France and in England, the nobles 
were, down to a late day, born and bred to war : 
and the duel, which in peace still held them to the 
risks of war, diminished the envy that in trading 
and studious nations would else have pried into 
their title. They were looked on as men who 
played high for a great stake. 

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be 

kept great. A creative economy is the fuel of 

magnificence. In the same line of Warwick, the 

successor next but one to Beauchamp was the stout 

1 Fuller's Worthies, II. p. 472. 



170 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

earl of Henry VI. and Edward IV. Few esteemed 
themselves in the mode, whose heads were not 
adorned with the black ragged staff, his badge. At 
his house in London, six oxen were daily eaten at a 
breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, 
and who had any acquaintance in his family should 
have as much boiled and roast as he could carry on 
a long dagger. 

The new age brings new qualities into request ; 
the virtues of pirates gave way to those of planters, 
merchants, senators and scholars. Comity, social 
talent and fine manners, no doubt, have had their 
part also. I have met somewhere with a histori- 
ette, which, whether more or less true in its particu- 
lars, carries a general truth. " How came the Duke 
of Bedford by his great landed estates ? His an- 
cestor having travelled on the continent, a lively, 
pleasant man, became the companion of a foreign 
prince wrecked on Dorsetshire coast, where Mr. 
Russell lived. The prince recommended him to 
Henry VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a 
large share of the plundered church lands." 

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken 
descent from the Norman, and has never worked 
for eight hundred years. But the fact is otherwise. 
Where is Bohun ? where is De Vere ? The law- 
yer, the farmer, the silkmercer lies perdu under 
the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say 



ARISTOCRACY. 171 

nothing ; especially skilful lawyers, nobody's sons, 
who did some piece of work at a nice moment for 
government and were rewarded with ermine. 

The national tastes of the English do not lead 
them to the life of the courtier, but to secure the 
comfort and independence of their homes. The 
aristocracy are marked by their predilection for 
country-life. They are called the county-families. 
They have often no residence in London and only 
go thither a short time, during the season, to see 
the opera ; but they concentrate the love and labor 
of many generations on the building, planting and 
decoration of their homesteads. Some of them are 
too old and too proud to wear titles, or, as Sheridan 
said of Coke, " disdain to hide their head in a 
coronet ; " and some curious examples are cited to 
show the stability of English families. Their prov- 
erb is, that fifty miles from London, a family will 
last a hundred years ; at a hundred miles, two hun- 
dred years ; and so on ; but I doubt that steam, the 
enemy of time as well as of space, will disturb 
these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of 
the first Duke of Buckingham, " He was born at 
Brookeby in Leicestershire, where his ancestors 
had chiefly continued about the space of four hun- 
dred years, rather without obscurity, than with any 
great lustre." 1 Wraxall says that in 1781, Lord 
1 Reliquiae Wottoniance, p. 208. 



172 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, told him that 
when the year 1783 should arrive, he meant to give 
a grand festival to all the descendants of the body 
of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when the 
dukedom should have remained three hundred 
years in their house, since its creation by Richard 
III. Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl Oxford, 
in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that 
name and blood six hundred years. 

This long descent of families and this cleaving 
through ages to the same spot of ground, capti- 
vates the imagination. It has too a connection with 
the names of the towns and districts of the country. 

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of 
legendary melody spread over the land. Older 
than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, 
this undershirt sits close to the body. What his- 
tory too, and what stores of primitive and savage 
observation it infolds ! Cambridge is the bridge 
of the Cam ; Sheffield the field of the river Sheaf ; 
Leicester the castra, or camp, of the Lear, or Leir, 
(now Soar) ; Rochdale, of the Roch ; Exeter or 
Excester, the castra of the Ex ; Exmouth, Dart- 
mouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of the 
Ex, Dart, Sid and Teign rivers. Waltham is 
strong town ; Radcliffe is red cliff ; and so on : — 
a sincerity and use in naming very striking to an 
American, whose country is whitewashed all over 



ARISTOCRACY. 173 

by unmeaning names, the cast-off clothes of the 
country from which its emigrants came ; or named 
at a pinch from a psalm-tune. But the English 
are those " barbarians " of Jamblichus, who " are 
stable in their manners, and firmly continue to em- 
ploy the same words, which also are dear to the 
gods." 

'Tis an old sneer that the Irish peerage drew 
their names from playbooks. The English lords 
do not call their lands after their own names, but 
call themselves after their lands, as if the man 
represented the country that bred him ; and they 
rightly wear the token of the glebe that gave them 
birth, suggesting that the tie is not cut, but that 
there in London, — the crags of Argyle, the kail 
of Cornwall, the downs of Devon, the iron of 
Wales, the clays of Stafford are neither forgetting 
nor forgotten, but know the man who was born 
by them and who, like the long line of his fathers, 
has carried that crag, that shore, dale, fen, or wood- 
land, in his blood and manners. It has, too, the 
advantage of suggesting responsibleness. A sus- 
ceptible man could not wear a name which repre- 
sented in a strict sense a city or a county of Eng- 
land, without hearing in it a challenge to duty and 
honor. 

The predilection of the patricians for residence 
in the country, combined with the degree of lib- 



174 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

erty possessed by the peasant, makes the safety of 
the English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically 
from England, in 1784, " If revolution break out 
in France, I tremble for the aristocracy : their 
chateaux will be reduced to ashes and their blood 
spilt in torrents. The English tenant would de- 
fend his lord to the last extremity." The English 
go to their estates for grandeur. The French live 
at court, and exile themselves to their estates for 
economy. As they do not mean to live with their 
tenants, they do not conciliate them, but wring 
from them the last sous. Evelyn writes from 
Blois, in 1644 : " The wolves are here in such num- 
bers, that they often come and take children out of 
the streets ; yet will not the Duke, who is sovereign 
here, permit them to be destroyed." 

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient 
families, the traveller is shown the palaces in Picca- 
dilly, Burlington House, Devonshire House, Lans- 
downe House in Berkshire Square, and lower down 
in the city, a few noble houses which still withstand 
in all their amplitude the encroachment of streets. 
The Duke of Bedford includes or included a mile 
square in the heart of London, where the Brit- 
ish Museum, once Montague House, now stands, 
and the land occupied by Woburn Square, Bedford 
Square, Bussell Square. The Marquis of West- 
minster built within a few years the series of 



ARISTOCRACY. 175 

squares called Belgravia. Stafford House is the 
noblest palace in London. Northumberland House 
holds its place by Charing Cross. Chesterfield 
House remains in Audley Street. Sion House and 
Holland House are in the suburbs. But most of 
the historical houses are masked or lost in the mod- 
ern uses to which trade or charity has converted 
them. A multitude of town palaces contain ines- 
timable galleries of art. 

In the country, the size of private estates is 
more impressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on 
the highway twenty-three miles from High Force, 
a fall of the Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby 
Castle, through the estate of the Duke of Cleve- 
land. The Marquis of Breadalbane rides out of 
his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the 
sea, on his own property. The Duke of Suther- 
land owns the county of Sutherland, stretching 
across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke of 
Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000 
acres in the County of Derby. The Duke of Rich- 
mond has 40,000 acres at Goodwood and 800,000 
at Gordon Castle. The Duke of Norfolk's park in 
Sussex is fifteen miles in circuit. An agriculturist 
bought lately the island of Lewes, in Hebrides, 
containing 500,000 acres. The possessions of the 
Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parlia- 
ment. This is the Heptarchy again ; and before 



176 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four 
persons sent three hundred and seven members to 
Parliament. The borough-mongers governed Eng- 
land. 

These large domains are growing larger. The 
great estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 
1786 the soil of England was owned by 250,000 
corporations and proprietors ; and in 1822, by 32,- 
000. These broad estates find room in this narrow 
island. All over England, scattered at short inter- 
vals among ship-yards, mills, mines and forges, are 
the paradises of the nobles, where the livelong 
repose and refinement are heightened by the con- 
trast with the roar of industry and necessity, out 
of which you have stepped aside. 

I was surprised to observe the very small attend- 
ance usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573 
peers, on ordinary days only twenty or thirty. 
Where are they ? I asked. " At home on their es- 
tates, devoured by ennui, or in the Alps, or up the 
Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, or in Egypt, or in 
India, on the Ghauts." But, with such interests at 
stake, how can these men afford to neglect them ? 
"O," replied my friend, "why should they work for 
themselves, when every man in England works for 
them and will suffer before they come to harm ? " 
The hardest radical instantly uncovers and changes 



ARISTOCRACY. 177 

his tone to a lord. It was remarked, on the 10th 
April, 1848 (the day of the Chartist demonstra- 
tion), that the upper classes were for the first time 
actively interesting themselves in their own de- 
fence, and men of rank were sworn special consta- 
bles with the rest. " Besides, why need they sit 
out the debate ? Has not the Duke of Wellington, 
at this moment, their proxies, — the proxies of fifty 
peers — in his pocket, to vote for them if there be 
an emergency? " 

It is however true that the existence of the 
House of Peers as a branch of the government en- 
titles them to fill half the Cabinet ; and their 
weight of property and station gives them a virtual 
nomination of the other half; whilst they have 
their share in the subordinate offices, as a school 
of training. This monopoly of political power has 
given them their intellectual and social eminence 
in Europe. A few law lords and a few political 
lords take the brunt of public business. In the 
army, the nobilit}^ fill a large part of the high com- 
missions, and give to these a tone of expense and 
splendor and also of exclusiveness. They have 
borne their full share of duty and danger in this 
service, and there are few noble families which have 
not paid, in some of their members, the debt of life 
or limb in the sacrifices of the Russian war. For 
the rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of 

VOL. v. 12 



178 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

state and of expense ; in questions of taste, in so- 
cial usages, in convivial and domestic hospitalities. 
In general, all that is required of them is to sit 
securely, to preside at public meetings, to coun- 
tenance charities and to give the example of that 
decorum so dear to the British heart. 

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what 
service this class have rendered ? — uses appear, or 
they would have perished long ago. Some of these 
are easily enumerated, others more subtle make a 
part of unconscious history. Their institution is 
one step in the progress of society. For a race 
yields a nobility in some form, however we name 
the lords, as surely as it yields women. 

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, 
educated men, born to wealth and power, who 
have run through every country and kept in every 
country the best company, have seen every secret 
of art and nature, and, when men of any ability or 
ambition, have been consulted in the conduct of 
every important action. You cannot wield great 
agencies without lending yourself to them, and 
when it happens that the spirit of the earl meets 
his rank and duties, we have the best examples of 
behavior. Power of any kind readily appears in 
the manners; and beneficent power, le talent de 
blen faire, gives a majesty which cannot be con- 
cealed or resisted. 



ARISTOCRACY. 179 

These people seem to gain as much as they lose 
by their position. They survey society as from the 
top of St. Paul's, and if they never hear plain 
truth from men, they see the best of every thing, 
in every kind, and they see things so grouped and 
amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, in- 
stead of tedious particularities. Their good behav- 
ior deserves all its fame, and they have that sim- 
plicity and that air of repose which are the finest 
ornament of greatness. 

The upper classes have only birth, say the people 
here, and not thoughts. Yes, but they have man- 
ners, and it is wonderful how much talent runs into 
manners : — nowhere and never so much as in Eii£- 
land. They have the sense of superiority, the ab- 
sence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in 
the aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought and 
feeling, and the power to command, among their 
other luxuries, the presence of the most accom- 
plished men in their festive meetings. 

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They 
wear the laws as ornaments, and walk by their 
faith in their painted May-Fair as if among the 
forms of gods. The economist of 1855 who asks, 
Of what use are the lords ? may learn of Franklin 
to ask, Of what use is a baby ? They have been a 
social church proper to inspire sentiments mutually 
honoring the lover and the loved. Politeness is 



180 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the ritual of society, as prayers are of the church, 
a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to the 
age in which it grew. 'T is a romance adorning 
English life with a larger horizon ; a midway 
heaven, fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales and 
poetry. This, just as far as the breeding of the 
nobleman really made him brave, handsome, ac- 
complished and great-hearted. 

On general grounds, whatever tends to form 
manners or to finish men, has a great value. Every 
one who has tasted the delight of friendship will re- 
spect every social guard which our manners can es- 
tablish, tending to secure from the intrusion of frivo- 
lous and distasteful people. The jealousy of every 
class to guard itself is a testimony to the reality 
they have found in life. When a man once knows 
that he has done justice to himself, let him dismiss 
all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as 
he is concerned. He who keeps the door of a mine, 
whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plum- 
bago, securely knows that the world cannot do 
without him. Every body who is real is open and 
ready for that which is also real. 

Besides, these are they who make England that 
strongbox and museum it is ; who gather and pro- 
tect works of art, dragged from amidst burning 
cities and revolutionary countries, and brought 
hither out of all the world. I look with respect at 



ARISTOCRACY. 181 

houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, like Warwick 
Castle, nine hundred years old. I pardoned high 
park-fences, when I saw that besides does and 
pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles, 
Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libra- 
ries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manu- 
scripts, monastic architectures, millennial trees and 
breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct. In these manors, 
after the frenzy of war and destruction subsides 
a little, the antiquary finds the frailest Roman jar 
or crumbling Egyptian mummy-case, without so 
much as a new layer of dust, keeping the series of 
history unbroken and waiting for its interpreter, 
who is sure to arrive. These lords are the treas- 
urers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their 
pride and wealth to this function. 

Yet there were other works for British dukes 
to do. George Loudon, Quintinye, Evelyn, had 
taught them to make gardens. Arthur Young, 
Bakewell and Mechi have made them agricultural. 
Scotland was a camp until the day of Culloden. 
The Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh and 
the Marquis of Breadalbane have introduced the 
rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the 
plantation of forests, the artificial replenishment of 
lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of game-pre- 
serves. Against the cry of the old tenantry and the 
sympathetic cry of the English press, they have 



182 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

rooted out and planted anew, and now six millions 
of people live, and live better, on the same land 
that fed three millions. 

The English barons, in every period, have been 
brave and great, after the estimate and opinion of 
their times. The grand old halls scattered up and 
down in England, are dumb vouchers to the state 
and broad hospitality of their ancient lords. Shak- 
speare's portraits of good Duke Humphrey, of War- 
wick, of Northumberland, of Talbot, were drawn 
in strict consonance with the traditions. A sketch 
of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen 
Elizabeth's archbishop Parker ; a Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury's autobiography ; the letters and essays 
of Sir Philip Sidney ; the anecdotes preserved by 
the antiquaries Fuller and Collins ; some glimpses 
at the interiors of noble houses, which we owe to 
Pepys and Evelyn ; the details which Ben Jonson's 
masques (performed at Kenilworth, Althorpe, Bel- 
voir and other noble houses), record or suggest; 
down to Aubrey's passages of the life of Hobbes in 
the house of the Earl of Devon, are favorable pic- 
tures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst 
still shines for us, and its Christinas revels, " where 
logs not burn, but men." At Wilton House the 
"Arcadia" was written, amidst conversations with 
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar 
1 Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, vol. 1, xii. 



ARISTOCRACY. 183 

mind, as his own poems declare him. I must hold 
Ludlow Castle an honest house, for which Mil- 
ton's " Comus " was written, and the company nobly 
bred which performed it with knowledge and sym- 
pathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, phi- 
losophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid 
virtues and of lofty sentiments ; often they have 
been the friends and patrons of genius and learn- 
ing, and especially of the fine arts ; and at this mo- 
ment, almost every great house has its sumptuous 
picture-gallery. 

Of course there is another side to this gorgeous 
show. Every victory was the defeat of a party 
only less worthy. Castles are proud things, but 
't is safest to be outside of them. War is a foul 
game, and yet war is not the worst part of aristo- 
cratic history. In later times, when the baron, edu- 
cated only for war, with his brains paralyzed by 
his stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew 
fat and wanton and a sorry brute. Grammont, 
Pepys and Evelyn show the kennels to which the 
king and court went in quest of pleasure. Prosti- 
tutes taken from the theatres were made duchesses, 
their bastards dukes and earls. " The young men 
sat uppermost, the old serious lords were out of 
favor." The discourse that the king's companions 
had with him was " poor and frothy." No man 
who valued his head might do what these pot-com- 



184 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

panions familiarly did with the king. In logical 
sequence of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell 
the beggarly shifts to which the king was reduced, 
who could not find paper at his council table, and 
" no handkerchers " in his wardrobe, " and but 
three bands to his neck," and the linen-draper and 
the stationer were out of pocket and refusing to 
trust him, and the baker will not bring bread any 
longer. Meantime the English Channel was swept 
and London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned 
too by English sailors, who, having been cheated 
of their pay for years by the king, enlisted with the 
enemy. 

The Selwyn correspondence, in the reign of 
George III., discloses a rottenness in the aristoc- 
racy which threatened to decompose the state. The 
sycophancy and sale of votes and honor, for place 
and title ; lewdness, gaming, smuggling, bribery 
and cheating ; the sneer at the childish indiscretion 
of quarrelling with ten thousand a year : the want 
of ideas ; the splendor of the titles, and the apathy 
of the nation, are instructive, and make the reader 
pause and explore the firm bounds which confined 
these vices to a handful of rich men. In the reign 
of the Fourth George, things do not seem to have 
mended, and the rotten debauchee let down from a 
window by an inclined plane into his coach to take 
the air, was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame 



ARISTOCRACY. 185 

of his queen and of his family did nothing to re- 
trieve. 

Under the present reign the perfect decorum of 
the Court is thought to have put a check on the 
gross vices of the aristocracy ; yet gaming, racing, 
drinking and mistresses bring them down, and the 
democrat can still gather scandals, if he will. Dis- 
mal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip of the 
last generation, of dukes served by bailiffs, with all 
their plate in pawn ; of great lords living by the 
showing of their houses, and of an old man wheeled 
in his chair from room to room, whilst his cham- 
bers are exhibited to the visitor for money ; of ru- 
ined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The 
historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, 
Marlboroughs and Hertfords have gained no new 
lustre, and now and then darker scandals break 
out, ominous as the new chapters added under 
the Orleans dynasty to the " Causes Celebres " in 
France. Even peers who are men of worth and 
public spirit are overtaken and embarrassed by 
their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Dev- 
onshire, willing to be the Mecsenas and Lucullus of 
his island, is reported to have said that he cannot 
live at Chatsworth but one month in the year. 
Their many houses eat them up. They cannot sell 
them, because they are entailed. They will not let 
them, for pride's sake, but keep them empty, aired, 



186 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of 
four or five thousand pounds a year. The spend- 
ing is for a great part in servants, in many houses 
exceeding a hundred. 

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, 
which, because it squanders such vast power of 
benefit, has the mischief of crime. " They might 
be little Providences on earth," said my friend, 
" and they are, for the most part, jockeys and fops." 
Campbell says, " Acquaintance with the nobility, 
I could never keep up. It requires a life of idle- 
ness, dressing and attendance on their parties." 
I suppose too that a feeling of self-respect is driv- 
ing cultivated men out of this society, as if the 
noble were slow to receive the lessons of the times 
and had not learned to disguise his pride of place. 
A man of wit, who is also one of the celebrities of 
wealth and fashion, confessed to his friend that 
he could not enter their houses without being made 
to feel that they were great lords, and he a low 
plebeian. With the tribe of a?*tistes, including the 
musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no terms, 
but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and Mario 
sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and 
other grandees, a cord was stretched between the 
singer and the company. 

When every noble was a soldier, they were care- 
fully bred to great personal prowess. The educa- 



ARISTOCRACY. 187 

tiou of a soldier is a simpler affair than that of an 
earl in the nineteenth century. And this was very 
seriously pursued ; they were expert in every spe- 
cies of equitation, to the most dangerous practices, 
and this down to the accession of William of Or- 
ange. But graver men appear to have framed 
their sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended her 
thought to the future ; and Sir Philip Sidney in 
his letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, 
gave plain and hearty counsel. Already too the 
English noble and squire were preparing for the 
career of the country-gentleman and his peaceable 
expense. They went from city to city, learning 
receipts to make perfumes, sweet powders, poman- 
ders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, coins and 
divers curiosities, preparing for a private life there- 
after, in which they should take pleasure in these 
recreations. 

All advantages given to absolve the young patri- 
cian from intellectual labor are of course mistaken. 
"In the university, noblemen are exempted from 
the public exercises for the degree, &c, by which 
they attain a degree called honorary. At the same 
time, the fees they have to pay for matriculation, 
and on all other occasions, are much higher." x 
Fuller records " the observation of foreigners, that 
Englishmen, by making their children gentlemen 
1 Huber, History of English Universities. 



188 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

before they are men, cause they are so seldom wise 
men." This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson's bit- 
ter apology for primogeniture, that " it makes but 
one fool in a family." 

The revolution in society has reached this class. 
The great powers of industrial art have no exclu- 
sion of name or blood. The tools of our time, 
namely steam, ships, printing, money and popular 
education, belong to those who can handle them ; 
and their effect has been that advantages once con- 
fined to men of family are now open to the whole 
middle class. The road that grandeur levels for 
his coach, toil can travel in his cart. 

This is more manifest every day, but I think it 
is true throughout English history. English his- 
tory, wisely read, is the vindication of the brain of 
that people. Here at last were climate and condi- 
tion friendly to the working faculty. Who now 
will work and dare, shall rule. This is the charter, 
or the chartism, which fogs and seas and rains 
proclaimed, — that intellect and personal force 
should make the law ; that industry and adminis- 
trative talent should administer ; that work should 
wear the crown. I know that not this, but something 
else is pretended. The fiction with which the 
noble and the bystander equally please themselves 
is that the former is of unbroken descent from the 
Norman, and so has never worked for eight hun- 



ARISTOCRACY. 189 

dred years. All the families are new, but the 
name is old, and they have made a covenant with 
their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis 
of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay 
and extinction of old families, the continual re- 
cruiting of these from new blood. The doors, 
though ostentatiously guarded, are really open, and 
hence the power of the bribe. All the barriers 
to rank only whet the thirst and enhance the prize. 
" Now," said Nelson, when clearing for battle, " a 
peerage, or Westminster Abbey ! " "I have no 
illusion left," said Sydney Smith, " but the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury." " The lawyers" said Burke, 
" are only birds of passage in this House of Com- 
mons," and then added, with a new figure, "they 
have their best bower anchor in the House of 
Lords." 

Another stride that has been taken appears in 
the perishing of heraldry. Whilst the privileges 
of nobility are passing to the middle class, the 
badge is discredited and the titles of lordship are 
getting musty and cumbersome. I wonder that 
sensible men have not been already impatient of 
them. They belong, with wigs, powder and scarlet 
coats, to an earlier age and may be advantageously 
consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the dignitaries 
of Australia and Polynesia. 

A multitude of English, educated at the univer- 



190 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

sities, bred into their society with manners, ability 
and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting 
the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping 
them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. 
That cultivated class is large and ever enlarging. 
It is computed that, with titles and without, there 
are seventy thousand of these people coming and 
going in London, who make up what is called high 
society. They cannot shut their eyes to the fact 
that an untitled nobility possess all the power with- 
out the inconveniences that belong to rank, and the 
rich Englishman goes over the world at the present 
day, drawing more than all the advantages which 
the strongest of his kings could command. 



CHAPTER XII. 

UNIVERSITIES. 

Of British universities, Cambridge has the most 
illustrious names on its list. At the present clay 
too, it has the advantage of Oxford, counting in its 
alumni a greater number of distinguished scholars. 
I regret that I had but a single day wherein to see 
King's College Chapel, the beautiful lawns and gar- 
dens of the colleges, and a few of its gownsmen. 

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations 
to Oxford, where I had introductions to Dr. Dau- 
beny, Professor of Botany, and to the Regius Pro- 
fessor of Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a 
Fellow of Oriel, and went thither on the last day 
of March, 1848. I was the guest of my friend in 
Oriel, was housed close upon that college, and I 
lived on college hospitalities. 

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the 
Bodleian Library, the Randolph Gallery, Merton 
Hall and the rest. I saw several faithful, high- 
minded young men, some of them in the mood of 
making sacrifices for peace of mind, — a topic, of 
course, on which I had no counsel to offer. Their 



192 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

affectionate and gregarious ways reminded me at 
once of the habits of our Cambridge men, though I 
imputed to these English an advantage in their 
secure and polished manners. The halls are rich 
with oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures 
of the founders hang from the walls ; the tables 
glitter with plate. A youth came forward to the 
upper table and pronounced the ancient form of 
grace before meals, which, I suppose, has been in 
use here for ages, Benedictus benedicat ; bene- 
dicitur, benedicatur. 

It is a curious proof of the English use and 
wont, or of their good nature, that these young 
men are locked up every night at nine o'clock, and 
the porter at each hall is required to give the name 
of any belated student who is admitted after that 
hour. Still more descriptive is the fact that out 
of twelve hundred young men, comprising the most 
spirited of the aristocracy, a duel has never oc- 
curred. 

Oxford is old, even in England, and conserva- 
tive. Its foundations date from Alfred and even 
from Arthur, if, as is alleged, the Pheryllt of 
the Druids had a seminary here. In the reign of 
Edward I., it is pretended, here were thirty thous- 
and students ; and nineteen most noble foundations 
were then established. Chaucer found it as firm 
as if it had always stood ; and it is, in British story, 



UNIVERSITIES. 193 

rich with great names, the school of the island 
and the link of England to the learned of Europe. 
Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 1497. Al- 
bericus Gentilis, in 1580, was relieved and main- 
tained by the university. Albert Alaskie, a noble 
Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who visited England to 
admire the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was enter- 
tained with stage-plays in the Refectory of Christ- 
church in 1583. Isaac Casaubon, coming from 
Henri Quatre of France by invitation of James L, 
was admitted to Christ's College, in July, 1613. I 
saw the Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ash- 
mole in 1682 sent twelve cart-loads of rarities. 
Here indeed was the Olympia of all Antony Wood's 
and Aubrey's games and heroes, and every inch of 
around has its lustre. For Wood's Athence Ox- 
onienses, or calendar of the writers of Oxford for 
two hundred years, is a lively record of English 
manners and merits, and as much a national mon- 
ument as Purchas's Pilgrims or Hansard's Regis- 
ter. On every side, Oxford is redolent of age and 
authority. Its gates shut of themselves against 
modern innovation. It is still governed by the 
statutes of Archbishop Laud. The books in Mer- 
ton Library are still chained to the wall. Here, 
on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro Populo 
Anglicano Defensio and Iconoclastes were commit- 
ted to the flames. I saw the school-court or quad- 

VOL. v. 13 



194 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

rangle where, in 1683, the Convocation caused the 
Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. 
I do not know whether this learned body have yet 
heard of the Declaration of American Indepen- 
dence, or whether the Ptolemaic astronomy does 
not still hold its ground against the novelties of 
Copernicus. 

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It 
is usual for a nobleman, or indeed for almost every 
wealthy student, on quitting college to leave behind 
him some article of plate ; and gifts of all values, 
from a hall or a fellowship or a library, down to a 
picture or a spoon, are continually accruing, in the 
course of a century. My friend Doctor J., gave me 
the following anecdote. In Sir Thomas Lawrence's 
collection at London were the cartoons of Raphael 
and Michel Angelo. This inestimable prize was 
offered to Oxford University for seven thousand 
pounds. The offer was accepted, and the commit- 
tee charged with the affair had collected three 
thousand pounds, when, among other friends, they 
called on Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred 
pounds, he surprised them by putting down his 
name for three thousand poimds. They told him 
they should now very easily raise the remainder. 
" No," he said, " your men have probably already 
contributed all they can spare ; I can as well give 
the rest : " and he withdrew his cheque for three 



UNIVERSITIES. 195 

thousand, and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw 
the whole collection in April, 1848. 

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed 
me the manuscript Plato, of the date of A. D. 896, 
brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt ; a manuscript 
Virgil of the same century ; the first Bible printed 
at Mentz (I believe in 1450) ; and a duplicate of 
the same, which had been deficient in about twenty 
leaves at the end. But one day, being in Venice, 
he bought a room full of books and manuscripts, — 
every scrap and fragment, — for four thousand 
louis d'ors, and had the doors locked and sealed by 
the consul. On proceeding afterwards to examine 
his purchase, he found the twenty deficient pages 
of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order ; brought them 
to Oxford with the rest of his purchase, and placed 
them in the volume ; but has too much awe for the 
Providence that appears in bibliography also, to 
suffer the reunited parts to be re-bound. The old- 
est building here is two hundred years younger 
than the frail manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke 
from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever lighted in 
the Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard cata- 
logue on the desk of every library in Oxford. In 
each several college they underscore in red ink on \ 
this catalogue the titles of books contained in the 
library of that college, — the theory being that the 
Bodleian has all books. This rich library spent 



196 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

during the last year (1847), for the purchase of 
books, £1,668. 

The logical English train a scholar as they train 
an engineer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wil- 
ton mills weave carpet and Sheffield grinds steel. 
They know the use of a tutor, as they know the 
use of a horse ; and they draw the greatest amount 
of benefit out of both. The reading men are kept, 
by hard walking, hard riding and measured eating 
and drinking, at the top of their condition, and 
two days before the examination, do no work, but 
lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college 
doomsday. Seven years' residence is the theoretic 
period for a master's degree. In point of fact, it 
has long been three years' residence, and four years 
more of standing. This " three years " is about 
twenty-one months in all. 1 

" The whole expense," says Professor Sewel, " of 
ordinary college tuition at Oxford, is about sixteen 
guineas a year." But this plausible statement may 
deceive a reader unacquainted with the fact that 
the principal teaching relied on is private tuition. 
And the expenses of private tuition are reckoned 
at from £50 to £70 a year, or $1,000 for the whole 
course of three years and a half. At Cambridge, 
1750 a year is economical, and $1,500 not extrava- 
gant. 2 

1 Huber, ii. p. 301. 

2 Bristed, Five Years at an English University. 



UNIVERSITIES. 197 

The number of students and of residents, the 
dignity of the authorities, the value of the founda- 
tions, the history and the architecture, the known 
sympathy of entire Britain in what is done there, 
justify a dedication to study in the undergraduate 
such as cannot easily be in America, where his col- 
lege is half suspected by the Freshman to be insig- 
nificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Ox- 
ford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and 
dignified enough to rank with other estates in the 
realm ; and where fame and secular promotion are 
to be had for study, and in a direction which has 
the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations. 

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses ; 
fills places, as they fall vacant, from the body of 
students. The number of fellowships at Oxford is 
540, averaging £200 a year, with lodging and diet 
at the college. If a young American, loving learn- 
ing and hindered by poverty, were offered a home, 
a table, the walks and the library in one of these 
academical palaces, and a thousand dollars a year, 
as long as he chose to remain a bachelor, he would 
dance for joy. Yet these young men thus happily 
placed, and paid to read, are impatient of their few 
checks, and many of them preparing to resign their 
fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect of 
dying a Fellow, and they pointed out to me a para- 
lytic old man, who was assisted into the hall. As 



198 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the number of undergraduates at Oxford is only 
about 1,200 or 1,300, and many of these are never 
competitors, the chance of a fellowship is very 
great. The income of the nineteen colleges is con- 
jectured at ,£150,000 a year. 

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge 
of Greek and Latin and of mathematics, and the 
solidity and taste of English criticism. Whatever 
luck there may be in this or that award, an Eton 
captain can write Latin longs and shorts, can turn 
the Court-Guide into hexameters, and it is certain 
that a Senior Classic can quote correctly from the 
Corpus Poetarum and is critically learned in all 
the humanities. Greek erudition exists on the Isis 
and Cam, whether the Maud man or the Brasenose 
man be properly ranked or not ; the atmosphere is 
loaded with Greek learning ; the whole river has 
reached a certain height, and kills all that growth 
of weeds which this Castalian water kills. The 
English nature takes culture kindly. So Milton 
thought. It refines the Norseman. Access to the 
Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. He has 
enough to think of, and, unless of an impulsive na- 
ture, is indisposed from writing or speaking, by the 
fulness of his mind and the new severity of his 
taste. The great silent crowd of thorough-bred 
Grecians always known to be around him, the Eng- 
lish writer cannot ignore. They prune his orations 



UNIVERSITIES. 190 

and point his pen. Hence the style and tone of 
English journalism. The men have learned accur- 
acy and comprehension, logic, and pace, or speed 
of working. They have bottom, endurance, wind. 
When born with good constitutions, they make 
those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the 
dura ilia, whose powers of performance compare 
with ours as the steam-hammer with the music- 
box ; — Cokes, Mansfields, Seldens and Bentleys, 
and when it happens that a superior brain puts a 
rider on this admirable horse, we obtain those mas- 
ters of the world who combine the highest energy 
in affairs with a supreme culture. 

It is contended by those who have been bred at 
Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Westminster, that the 
public sentiment within each of those schools is 
high-toned and manly ; that, in their playgrounds, 
courage is universally admired, meanness despised, 
manly feelings and generous conduct are encour- 
aged : that an unwritten code of honor deals to the 
spoiled child of rank and to the child of upstart 
wealth, an even-handed justice, purges their non- 
sense out of both and does all that can be done to 
make them gentlemen. 

Again, at the universities, it is urged that all 
goes to form what England values as the flower 
of its national life, — a well-educated gentleman. 
The German Huber, in describing to his country- 



200 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

men the attributes of an English gentleman, frank- 
ly admits that " in Germany, we have nothing of 
the kind. A gentleman must possess a political 
character, an independent and public position, or 
at least the right of assuming it. He must have 
average opulence, either of his own, or in his fam- 
ily. He should also have bodily activity and 
strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in pub- 
lic offices. The race of English gentlemen pre- 
sents an appearance of manly vigor and form not 
elsewhere to be found among an equal number of 
persons. No other nation produces the stock. And 
in England, it has deteriorated. The university is 
a decided presumption in any man's favor. And 
so eminent are the members that a glance at the 
calendars will show that in all the world one can- 
not be in better company than on the books of one 
of the larger Oxford or Cambridge colleges." 1 

These seminaries are finishing schools for the 
upper classes, and not for the poor. The useful 
is exploded. The definition of a public school is 
" a school which excludes all that could fit a man 
for standing behind a counter." 2 

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted. 

1 Huber, History of the English Universities, Newman's 
Translation. 

2 See Bristed, Five Years in an English University. New- 
York, 1852. 



UNIVERSITIES. 201 

Oxford, which equals in wealth several of the 
smaller European states, shuts up the lectureships 
which were made " public for all men thereunto 
to have concourse ; " mis-spends the revenues be- 
stowed for such youths " as should be most meet 
for towardness, poverty and painfulness ; " there 
is gross favoritism ; many chairs and many fellow- 
ships are made beds of ease ; and it is likely that 
the university will know how to resist and make 
inoperative the terrors of parliamentary inquiry ; 
no doubt their learning is grown obsolete ; — but 
Oxford also has its merits, and I found here also 
proof of the national fidelity and thoroughness. 
Such knowledge as they prize they possess and im- 
part. Whether in course or by indirection, whether 
by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes 
and foundation scholarships, education, according 
to the English notion of it, is arrived at. I looked 
over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for 
the various scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, 
the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland and the University 
(copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek 
professor), containing the tasks which many com- 
petitors had victoriously performed, and I believed 
they would prove too severe tests for the candi- 
dates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard. 
And in general, here was proof of a more search- 
ing study in the appointed directions, and the 



202 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

knowledge pretended to be conveyed was con- 
veyed. Oxford sends ont yearly twenty or thirty 
very able men and three or four hundred well-edu- 
cated men. 

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain 
amount of old Norse power. A fop will fight, and 
in exigent circumstances will play the manly part. 
In seeing these youths I believed I saw already an 
advantage in vigor and color and general habit, 
over their contemporaries in the American col- 
leges. No doubt much of the power and brilliancy 
of the reading-men is merely constitutional or hy- 
gienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gym- 
nastics, with five miles more walking, or five ounces 
less eating, or with a saddle and gallop of twenty 
miles a day, with skating and rowing-matches, the 
American would arrive at as robust exegesis and 
cheery and hilarious tone. I should readily con- 
cede these advantages, which it would be easy to 
acquire, if I did not find also that they read better 
than we, and write better. 

English wealth falling on their school and uni- 
versity training, makes a systematic reading of the 
best authors, and to the end of a knowledge how 
the things whereof they treat really stand : whilst 
pamphleteer or journalist, reading for an argument 
for a party, or reading to write, or at all events for 
some by-end imposed on them, must read meanly 



UNIVERSITIES. 203 

and fragmentarily. Charles I. said that he under- 
stood English law as well as a gentleman ought to 
understand it. 

Then they have access to books ; the rich libra- 
ries collected at every one of many thousands of 
houses, give an advantage not to be attained by a 
youth in this country, when one thinks how much 
more and better may be learned by a scholar who, 
immediately on hearing of a book, can consult it, 
than by one who is on the quest, for years, and 
reads inferior books because he cannot find the 
best. 

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep 
each other up to a high standard. The habit of 
meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the 
art of omission and selection. 

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, 
which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit 
the routine : as churches and monasteries persecute 
youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to col- 
lege, and though he be a genius, the youth must 
take his chance. The university must be retrospec- 
tive. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on 
all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is 
a library, and the professors must be librarians. 
And I should as soon think of quarrelling with 
the janitor for not magnifying his office by hostile 
sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch 



204 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

or Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors 
for not admiring the young neologists who pluck 
the beards of Euclid and Aristotle, or for not 
attempting themselves to fill their vacant shelves 
as original writers. 

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if 
we will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius 
exists there also, but will not answer a call of a 
committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, 
precarious, eccentric and darkling. England is 
the land of mixture and surprise, and when you 
have settled it that the universities are moribund, 
out comes a poetic influence from the heart of 
Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to build 
their houses as simply as birds their nests, to give 
veracity to art and charm mankind, as an appeal to 
moral order always must. But besides this restor- 
ative genius, the best poetry of England of this 
age, in the old forms, comes from two graduates 
of Cambridge. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RELIGION. 

No people at the present clay can be explained 
by their national religion. They do not feel re- 
sponsible for it ; it lies far outside of them. Their 
loyalty to truth and their labor and expenditure 
rest on real foundations, and not on a national 
church. And English life, it is evident, does not 
grow out of the Athanasian creed, or the Articles, 
or the Eucharist. It is with religion as with mar- 
riage. A youth marries in haste ; afterwards, when 
his mind is opened to the reason of the conduct of 
life, he is asked what he thinks of the institution 
of marriage and of the right relations of the sexes ? 
' I should have much to say,' he might reply, ' if 
the question were open, but I have a wife and 
children, and all question is closed for me.' In 
the barbarous days of a nation, some cultus is 
formed or imported; altars are built, tithes are 
paid, priests ordained. The education and expen- 
diture of the country take that direction, and when 
wealth, refinement, great men, and ties to the world 
supervene, its prudent men say, Why fight against 



206 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Fate, or lift these absurdities which are now moun- 
tainous ? Better find some niche or crevice in this 
mountain of stone which religious ages have quar- 
ried and carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than 
attempt any thing ridiculously and dangerously 
above your strength, like removing it. 

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes 
say, as to-day in front of Dundee Church tower, 
which is eight hundred years old, ' This was built 
by another and a better race than any that now 
look on it.' And plainly there has been great 
power of sentiment at work in this island, of which 
these buildings are the proofs ; as volcanic basalts 
show the work of fire which has been extinguished 
for ages. England felt the full heat of the Chris- 
tianity which fermented Europe, and drew, like the 
chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and 
culture. The power of the religious sentiment put 
an end to human sacrifices, checked appetite, in- 
spired the crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants, 
inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and 
slavery, founded liberty, created the religious ar- 
chitecture, — York, Newstead, Westminster, Foun- 
tains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley and Dundee, — works 
to which the key is lost, with the sentiment which 
created them ; inspired the English Bible, the lit- 
urgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Rich- 
ard of Devizes. The priest translated the Vulgate, 



RELIGION. 207 

and translated the sanctities of old hagiology into 
English virtues on English ground. It was a cer- 
tain affirmative or aggressive state of the Cauca- 
sian races. Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of 
ages. The violence of the northern savages exas- 
perated Christianity into power. It lived by the 
love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted 
two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found at- 
tached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite 
from labor for the boor on the Sabbath and on 
church festivals. " The lord who compelled his 
boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sun- 
set on Sunday, forfeited him altogether." The 
priest came out of the people and sympathized 
with his class. The church was the mediator, 
check and democratic principle, in Europe. Lati- 
mer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, 
Sir Harry Yane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan are 
the democrats, as well as the saints of their times. 
The Catholic church, thrown on this toiling, serious 
people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive 
system, close fitted to the manners and genius of 
the country, at once domestical and stately. In 
the long time, it has blended with every thing in 
heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves 
through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every 
day of the year, every town and market and head- 
land and monument, and has coupled itself with 



208 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the almanac, that no court can be held, no field 
ploughed, no horse shod, without some leave from 
the church. All maxims of prudence or shop or 
farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence 
its strength in the agricultural districts. The dis- 
tribution of land into parishes enforces a church 
sanction to every civil privilege ; and the gradation 
of the clergy, — prelates for the rich and curates 
for the poor, — with the fact that a classical educa- 
tion has been secured to the clergyman, makes them 
"the link which unites the sequestered peasantry 
with the intellectual advancement of the age." 1 

The English church has many certificates to show 
of humble effective service in humanizing the peo- 
ple, in cheering and refining men, feeding, healing 
and educating. It has the seal of martyrs and 
confessors ; the noblest books ; a sublime architec- 
ture ; a ritual marked by the same secular merits, 
nothing cheap or purchasable. 

From this slow-grown church important reactions 
proceed ; much for culture, much for giving a di- 
rection to the nation's affection and will to-day. 
The carved and pictured chapel, — its entire sur- 
face animated with image and emblem, — made the 
parish-church a sort of book and Bible to the peo- 
ple's eye. 

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a 
1 Wordsworth. 



RELIGION. 209 

service in the vernacular tongue, it was the tutor 
and university of the people. In York minster, on 
the day of the enthronization of the new arch- 
bishop, I heard the service of evening prayer read 
and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear 
the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and 
Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with cir- 
cumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th Janu- 
ary, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just 
fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine, 
and listening with all the devotion of national pride. 
That was binding old and new to some purpose. 
The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of 
civilization, for thus has the history of the world 
been preserved and is preserved. Here in England 
every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the 
Times. 

Another part of the same service on this occa- 
sion was not insignificant. Handel's coronation 
anthem, God save the King, was played by Dr. 
Camidge on the organ, with sublime effect. The 
minster and the music were made for each other. 
It was a hint of the part the church plays as a po- 
litical engine. From his infancy, every English- 
man is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the 
queen, for the royal family and the Parliament, by 
name ; and this lifelong consecration cannot be with- 
out influence on his opinions. 

vol. v. 14 



210 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The universities also are parcel of the ecclesi- 
astical system, and their first design is to form the 
clergy. Thus the clergy for a thousand years have 
been the scholars of the nation. 

The national temperament deeply enjoys the un- 
broken order and tradition of its church ; the lit- 
urgy, ceremony, architecture ; the sober grace, the 
good company, the connection with the throne and 
with history, which adorn it. And whilst it en- 
dears itself thus to men of more taste than activity, 
the stability of the English nation is passionately 
enlisted to its support, from its inextricable connec- 
tion with the cause of public order, with politics 
and with the funds. 

Good churches are not built by bad men; at 
least there must be probity and enthusiasm some- 
where in the society. These minsters were neither 
built nor filled by atheists. No church has had 
more learned, industrious or devoted men ; plenty 
of "clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns, 
would turn their backs on no man." l Their ar- 
chitecture still glows with faith in immortality. 
Heats and genial periods arrive in history, or, shall 
we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by which 
high tides are caused in the human spirit, and great 
virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, 
i Fuller. 



RELIGION. 211 

twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, when the nation was full of 
genius and piety. 

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arun- 
dels, Beekets ; of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers ; 
of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts ; of the Sher- 
locks and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in 
opinion have made it impossible that men like these 
should return, or find a place in their once sacred 
stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this church has 
glided away to animate other activities, and they 
who come to the old shrines find apes and players 
rustling the old garments. 

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. 
When you see on the continent the well-dressed 
Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel 
and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth- 
brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much 
national pride prays with him, and the religion of a 
gentleman. So far is he from attaching any mean- 
ing to the words, that he believes himself to have 
done almost the generous thing, and that it is very 
condescending in him to pray to God. A great 
duke said on the occasion of a victory, in the House 
of Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had 
not been well used by them, and that it would be- 
come their magnanimity, after so great successes, 
to take order that a proper acknowledgment be 



212 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

made. It is the church of the gentry, but it is not 
the church of the poor. The operatives do not own 
it, and gentlemen lately testified in the House of 
Commons that in their lives they never saw a poor 
man in a ragged coat inside a church. 

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigor- 
ous English understanding shows how much wit 
and folly can agree in one brain. Their religion is 
a quotation ; their church is a doll ; and any exam- 
ination is interdicted with screams of terror. In 
good company you expect them to laugh at the 
fanaticism of the vulgar ; but they do not ; they 
are the vulgar. 

The English, in common perhaps with Christen- 
dom in the nineteenth century, do not respect 
power, but only performance ; value ideas only for 
an economic result. Wellington esteems a saint 
only as far as he can be an army chaplain : " Mr. 
Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good sense, 
got the better of Methodism, which had appeared 
among the soldiers and once among the officers." 
They value a philosopher as they value an apothe- 
cary who brings bark or a drench ; and inspiration 
is only some blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid. 

I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a 
valve that can be closed at pleasure, as an engineer 
shuts off steam. The most sensible and well-in- 
formed men possess the power of thinking just so 



RELIGION. 213 

far as the bishop in religious matters, and as the 
chancellor of the exchequer in politics. They talk 
with courage and logic, and show you magnificent 
results, but the same men who have brought free 
trade or geology to their present standing, look 
grave and lofty and shut down their valve as soon 
as the conversation approaches the English church. 
After that, you talk with a box-turtle. 

The action of the university, both in what is 
taught and in the spirit of the place, is directed 
more on producing an English gentleman, than a 
saint or a psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and 
extrudes a philosopher. I do not know that there 
is more cabalism in the Anglican than in other 
churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified 
with the aristocracy. They say here, that if you 
talk with a clergyman, you are sure to find him 
well-bred, informed and candid : he entertains your 
thought or your project with sympathy and praise. 
But if a second clergyman come in, the sympathy 
is at an end : two together are inaccessible to your 
thought, and whenever it conies to action, the 
clergyman invariably sides with his church. 

The Anglican church is marked by the grace 
and good sense of its forms, by the manly grace of 
its clergy. The gospel it preaches is ' By taste are 
ye saved.' It keeps the old structures in repair, 
spends a world of money in music and building, 



214 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and in buying Pugin and architectural literature. 
It lias a general good name for amenity and mild- 
ness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church ; 
it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive ; is per- 
fectly well-bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper 
occasions. If you let it alone, it will let you alone. 
But its instinct is hostile to all change in politics, 
literature, or social arts. The church has not been 
the founder of the London University, of the Me- 
chanics' Institutes, of the Free School, of whatever 
aims at diffusion of knowledge. The Platonists of 
Oxford are as bitter against this heresy, as Thomas 
Taylor. 

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion 
of England. The first leaf of the New Testament 
it does not open. It believes in a Providence 
which does not treat with levity a pound sterling. 
They are neither transcendentalists nor Christians. 
They put up no Socratic prayer, much less any 
saintly prayer for the queen's mind ; ask neither 
for light nor right, but say bluntly, " Grant her in 
health and wealth long to live." And one traces 
this Jewish prayer in all English private history, 
from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of 
Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir 
Samuel Romilly and of Haydon the painter. 
"Abroad with my wife," writes Pepys piously, 
" the first time that ever I rode in my own coach ; 



RELIGION. 215 

which do make my heart rejoice and praise God, 
and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it." 
The bill for the naturalization of the Jews ( in 
1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of 
the kingdom, and by petition from the city of Lon- 
don, reprobating this bill, as " tending extremely 
to the dishonor of the Christian religion, and ex- 
tremely injurious to the interests and commerce of 
the kingdom in general, and of the city of London 
in particular." 

But they have not been able to congeal humanity 
by act of Parliament. " The heavens journey still 
and sojourn not," and arts, wars, discoveries and 
opinion go onward at their own pace. The new 
age has new desires, new enemies, new trades, new 
charities, and reads the Scriptures with new eyes. 
The chatter of French politics, the steam-whistle, 
the hum of the mill and the noise of embarking 
emigrants had quite put most of the old legends 
out of mind ; so that when you came to read the 
liturgy to a modern congregation, it was almost ab- 
surd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade 
of old costumes. 

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to 
crystallize a religion. It is endogenous, like the 
skin and other vital organs. A new statement 
every day. The prophet and apostle knew this, 
and the nonconformist confutes the conformists, by 



216 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

quoting the texts they must allow. It is the con- 
dition of a religion to require religion for its ex- 
positor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly 
understood by prophet and apostle. The states- 
man knows that the religious element will not fail, 
any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle ; 
but it is in its nature constructive, and will organ- 
ize such a church as it wants. The wise legislator 
will spend on temples, schools, libraries, colleges, 
but will shun the enriching of priests. If in any 
manner he can leave the election and paying of 
the priest to the people, he will do well. Like 
the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a 
class of priests, and create opportunity and expec- 
tation in the society to run to meet natural endow- 
ment in this kind. But when wealth accrues to 
a chaplaincy, a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires 
moneyed men for its stewards, who will give it 
another direction than to the mystics of their day. 
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will 
steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the 
people to whom it was bequeathed. The class 
certain to be excluded from all preferment are the 
religious, — and driven to other churches ; which 
is nature's vis medicatrix. 

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are 
overpaid. This abuse draws into the church the 
children of the nobility and other unfit persons 



RELIGION. 217 

who have a taste for expense. Thus a bishop is 
only a surplieed merchant. Through his lawn I 
can see the bright buttons of the shopman's coat 
glitter. A wealth like that of Durham makes al- 
most a premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech 
in the House of Commons on the Irish elective 
franchise, said, "How will the reverend bishops 
of the other house be able to express their due ab- 
horrence of the crime of perjury, who solemnly 
declare in the presence of God that when they 
are called upon to accept a living, perhaps of 
£4,000 a year, at that very instant they are moved 
by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and admin- 
istration thereof, and for no other reason what- 
ever ? " The modes of initiation are more dam- 
aging than custom-house oaths. The Bishop is 
elected by the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. 
The queen sends these gentlemen a conge (Telire, 
or leave to elect ; but also sends them the name 
of the person whom they are to elect. They go 
into the cathedral, chant and pray and beseech the 
Holy Ghost to assist them in their choice ; and, 
after these invocations, invariably find that the 
dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recom- 
mendations of the Queen. 

But you must pay for conformity. All goes 
well as long as you run with conformists. But 
you, who are an honest man in other particulars, 



218 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

know that there is alive somewhere a man whose 
honesty reaches to this point also that he shall not 
kneel to false gods, and on the day when you meet 
him, you sink into the class of counterfeits. Be- 
sides, this succumbing has grave penalties. If you 
take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to 
it. England accepts this ornamented national 
church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives 
the voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the under- 
standing of the receivers. 

The English church, undermined by German 
criticism, had nothing left but tradition ; and was 
led logically back to Romanism. But that was an 
element which only hot heads could breathe : in 
view of the educated class, generally, it was not a 
fact to front the sun ; and the alienation of such 
men from the church became complete. 

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious 
persons are driven out of the Established Church 
into sects, which instantly rise to credit and hold 
the Establishment in check. Nature has sharper 
remedies, also. The English, abhorring change in 
all things, abhorring it most in matters of religion, 
cling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully 
given to cant. The English (and I wish it were 
confined to them, but 't is a taint in the Anglo- 
Saxon blood in both hemispheres), — the English 
and the Americans cant beyond all other nations. 



RELIGION. 219 

The French relinquish all that industry to them. 
What is so odious as the polite bows to God, in 
our books and newspapers ? The popular press is 
flagitious in the exact measure of its sanctimony, 
and the religion of the day is a theatrical Sinai, 
where the thunders are supplied by the property- 
man. The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. 
Punch finds an inexhaustible material. Dickens 
writes novels on Exeter-Hall humanity. Thack- 
eray exposes the heartless high life. Nature re- 
venges herself more summarily by the heathenism 
of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury calls the 
poor thieves together and reads sermons to them, 
and they call it ' gas.' George Borrow summons 
the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews 
in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles' Creed 
in Romany. "When I had concluded," he says, 
" I looked around me. The features of the as- 
sembly were twisted, and the eyes of all turned 
upon me with a frightful squint : not an individual 
present but squinted ; the genteel Pepa, the good- 
humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted ; 
the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all." 

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. 
She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop 
meets an intelligent gentleman and reads fatal in- 
terrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to 
take wine with him. False position introduces 



220 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

cant, perjury, simony and ever a lower class of 
mind and character into the clergy: and, when 
the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, 
afraid of piety, afraid of tradition and afraid of 
theology, there is nothing left but to quit a church 
which is no longer one. 

But the religion of England, — is it the Estab- 
lished Church ? no ; is it the sects ? no ; they are 
only perpetuations of some private man's dissent, 
and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a 
coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really the 
same thing. Where dwells the religion ? Tell me 
first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought, 
or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. 
Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and 
ended, like London Monument or the Tower, so 
that you shall know where to find it, and keep it 
fixed, as the English do with their things, forever- 
more ; it is passing, glancing, gesticular ; it is a 
traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret, which per- 
plexes them and puts them out. Yet, if religion be 
the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering 
of all evil, souffrir de tout le moncle, et ne /aire 
soitffi*ir personne^ that divine secret has existed in 
England from the days of Alfred to those of Rom- 
illy, of Clarkson and of Florence Nightingale, and 
in thousands who have no fame. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

LITERATURE. 



A strong common sense, which it is not easy to 
unseat or disturb, marks the English mind for a 
thousand years : a rude strength newly applied to 
thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately 
learned to read. They have no fancy, and never 
are surprised into a covert or witty word, such as 
pleased the Athenians and Italians, and was con- 
vertible into a fable not long after ; but they de- 
light in strong earthy expression, not mistakable, 
coarsely true to the human body, and, though 
spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome to 
the mob. This homeliness, veracity and plain 
style appear in the earliest extant works and in 
the latest. It imports into songs and ballads the 
smell of the earth, the breath of cattle, and, like a 
Dutch painter, seeks a household charm, though 
by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional 
utility in verse. The kail and herrings are never 
out of sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself 
from every sally of the imagination. The English 
muse loves the farmyard, the lane and market. 



222 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

She says, with De Stael, "I tramp in the mire 
with wooden shoes, whenever they would force me 
into the clouds." For the Englishman has accurate 
perceptions ; takes hold of things by the right end, 
and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves 
the axe, the spade, the oar, the gun, the steam- 
pipe : he has built the engine he uses. He is ma- 
terialist, economical, mercantile. He must be 
treated with sincerity and reality ; with muffins, 
and not the promise of muffins; and prefers his 
hot chop, with perfect security and convenience in 
the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and 
Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed pa- 
per. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a phi- 
losopher, he carries the same hard truth and the 
same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His 
mind must stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, 
or catch at clouds, but the mind must have a sym- 
bol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in 
Dante is the vise-like tenacity with which he holds 
a mental image before the eyes, as if it were a 
scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron " liked 
something craggy to break his mind upon." A 
taste for plain strong speech, what is called a bib- 
lical style, marks the English. It is in Alfred 
and the Saxon Chronicle and in the Sagas of the 
Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes was 
perfect in the " noble vulgar speech." Donne, 



LITERATURE. 223 

Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, 
Cotton and the translators wrote it. How realistic 
or materialistic in treatment of his subject is 
Swift. He describes his fictitious persons as if 
for the police. Defoe has no insecurity or choice. 
Hudibras has the same hard mentality, — keeping 
the truth at once to the senses and to the intellect. 

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard 
painting of his Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the I 

senses. Shakspeare, Spenser and Milton, in their 
loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exacti- 
tude of mind. This mental materialism makes the 
value of English transcendental genius ; in these 
writers and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne and 
Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism and 
narrowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, 
makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Milton. 
When it reaches the pure element, it treads the 
clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its ele- 
vations materialistic, its poetry is common sense in- 
spired ; or iron raised to white heat. 

The marriage of the two qualities is in their 
speech. It is a tacit rule of the language to make 
the frame or skeleton of Saxon words, and, when 
elevation or ornament is sought, to interweave 
Roman, but sparingly ; nor is a sentence made of 
Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The 
children and laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The 



224 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges and 
Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English 
island ; and, in their dialect, the male principle is 
the Saxon, the female, the Latin ; and they are 
combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he 
has indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste 
to chasten and nerve his period by English mono- 
syllables. 

When the Gothic nations came into Europe they 
found it lighted with the sun and moon of Hebrew 
and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, 
long kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the 
double glory. To the images from this twin source 
(of Christianity and art), the mind became fruitful 
as by the incubation of the Holy Ghost. The Eng- 
lish mind flowered in every faculty. The common- 
sense was surprised and inspired. For two centu- 
ries England was philosophic, religious, poetic. 
The mental furniture seemed of larger scale : the 
memory capacious like the storehouse of the rains. 
The ardor and endurance of study, the boldness and 
facility of their mental construction, their fancy and 
imagination and easy spanning of vast distances of 
thought, the enterprise or accosting of new subjects, 
and, generally, the easy exertion of power, — aston- 
ish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. 
The union of Saxon precision and Oriental soaring, 
of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is 



LITERATURE. 225 

shared in less degree by the writers of two centu- 
ries. I find not only the great masters out of all 
rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the 
time charged with a masculine force and freedom. 

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor and 
closeness to the matter in hand even in the second 
and third class of writers ; and, I think, in the com- 
mon style of the people, as one finds it in the cita- 
tion of wills, letters and public documents ; in prov- 
erbs and forms of speech. The more hearty and 
sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness 
of the Norseman was not all gone. Their dynamic 
brains hurled off their words as the revolving stone 
hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the sev- 
enteenth century sentences and phrases of edge not 
to be matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by 
simple force of mind equalized themselves with the 
accumulated science of ours. The country gentle- 
men had a posset or drink they called October ; 
and the poets, as if by this hint, knew how to distil 
the whole season into their autumnal verses : and 
as nature, to pique the more, sometimes works up 
deformities into beauty in some rare Aspasia or 
Cleopatra ; and as the Greek art wrought many a 
vase or column, in which too long or too lithe, or 
nodes, or pits and flaws are made a beauty of ; — 
so these were so quick and vital that they could 
charm and enrich by mean and vulgar objects. 

VOL. v. 15 



226 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

A man must think that age well taught and 
thoughtful, by which masques and poems, like 
those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a 
manly style, were received with favor. The unique 
fact in literary history, the unsurprised reception 
of Shakspeare ; — the reception proved by his mak- 
ing his fortune ; and the apathy proved by the ab- 
sence of all contemporary panegyric, — seems to 
demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people. 
Judge of the splendor of a nation by the insignifi- 
cance of great individuals in it. The manner in 
which they learned Greek and Latin, before our 
modern facilities were yet ready ; without diction- 
aries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a pro- 
fessor, followed by their own searchings, — required 
a more robust memory, and cooperation of all the 
faculties; and their scholars, Camden, Usher, Sel- 
den, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bent- 
ley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity and method 
of engineers. 

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. 
Their minds loved analogy ; were cognisant of re- 
semblances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. 
'T is a very old strife between those who elect to 
see identity and those who elect to see discrep- 
ances ; and it renews itself in Britain. The poets, 
of course, are of one part ; the men of the world, 
of the other. But Britain had many disciples of 



LITERATURE. 227 

Plato ; — More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord 
Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chap- 
man, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berke- 
ley, Jeremy Taylor. 

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His cen- 
turies of observations on useful science, and his ex- 
periments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One 
hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or 
any one who had a talent for experiment, was 
worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he 
drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the influx 
of idealism into England. Where that goes, is 
poetry, health and progress. The rules of its gene- 
sis or its diffusion are not known. That knowl- 
edge, if we had it, would supersede all that we call 
science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or 
of meta-chemistry ; — the vital point being, how 
far the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking re- 
semblances, predominated. For wherever the mind 
takes a step, it is to put itself at one with a larger 
class, discerned beyond the lesser class with which 
it has been conversant. Hence, all poetry and all 
affirmative action comes. 

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the 
analogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, 
naming from the best example) Platonists. Who- 
ever discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts 
before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic 



228 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

power, and nothing original or beautiful will be 
produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx 
of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the 
Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic 
tendency ; the so-called scientific is the negative 
and poisonous. 'T is quite certain that Spenser, 
Burns, Byron and Wordsworth will be Platonists, 
and that the dull men will be Lockists. Then poli- 
tics and commerce will absorb from the educated 
class men of talents without genius, precisely be- 
cause such have no resistance. 

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, 
required in his map of the mind, first of all, uni- 
versality, or prima philosophia ; the receptacle for 
all such profitable observations and axioms as fall 
not within the compass of any of the special parts 
of philosophy, but are more common and of a 
higher stage. He held this element essential : it 
is never out of mind : he never spares rebukes for 
such as neglect it ; believing that no perfect dis- 
covery can be made in a flat or level, but you must 
ascend to a higher science. " If any man thinketh 
philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he 
doth not consider that all professions are from 
thence served and supplied ; and this I take to be 
a great cause that has hindered the progression of 
learning, because these fundamental knowledges 
have been studied but in passage." He explained 



LITERATURE. 229 

himself by giving various quaint examples of the 
summary or common laws of which each science 
has its own illustration. He complains that " he 
finds this part of learning very deficient, the pro- 
founder sort of wits drawing a bucket now and 
then for their own use, but the spring-head unvis- 
ited. This was the dry light which did scorch and 
offend most men's watery natures." Plato had 
signified the same sense, when he said " All the 
great arts require a subtle and speculative research 
into the law of nature, since loftiness of thought 
and perfect mastery over every subject seem to be 
derived from some such source as this. This Per- 
icles had, in addition to a great natural genius. 
For, meeting with Anaxagoras, who was a person 
of this kind, he attached himself to him, and nour- 
ished himself with sublime speculations on the ab- 
solute intelligence ; and imported thence into the 
oratorical art whatever could be useful to it." 

A few generalizations always circulate in the 
world, whose authors we do not rightly know, which 
astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast king- 
doms of thought, and these are in the world con- 
stants, like the Copernican and Newtonian theories 
in physics. In England these may be traced usu- 
ally to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even 
to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do all have a 
kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks, 



230 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Of this kind is Lord Bacon's sentence, that " Na- 
ture is commanded by obeying her ; " his doctrine 
of poetry, which " accommodates the shows of 
things to the desires of the mind," or the Zoroas- 
trian definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, " ap- 
parent pictures of unapparent natures ; " Spenser's 
creed that " soul is form, and doth the body make ; " 
the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain as- 
surance of the existence of matter ; Doctor Samuel 
Clarke's argument for theism from the nature of 
space and time ; Harrington's political rule that 
power must rest on land, — a rule which requires 
to be liberally interpreted ; the theory of Sweden- 
borg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man 
makes his heaven and hell ; Hegel's study of civil 
history, as the conflict of ideas and the victory of 
the deeper thought; the identity - philosophy of 
Schelling, couched in the statement that " all dif- 
ference is quantitative." So the very announce- 
ment of the theory of gravitation, of Kepler's three 
harmonic laws, and even of Dalton's doctrine of 
definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the 
mind, which remains a superior evidence to empiri- 
cal demonstrations. I cite these generalizations, 
some of which are more recent, merely to indicate 
a class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane 
or the atmosphere from which they emanate was the 
home and element of the writers and readers in 



LITERATURE. 231 

what we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say, in 
literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet 
a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jon- 
son's remark on Lord Bacon, — "About his time, 
and within his view, were born all the wits that 
could honor a nation, or help study." 

Such richness of genius had not existed more 
than once before. These heights could not be 
maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in 
our exhausted soils, and have received traditions 
of their ancient fertility to tillage, so history reck- 
ons epochs in which the intellect of famed races 
became effete. So it fared with English genius. 
These heights were followed by a meanness and a 
descent of the mind into lower levels ; the loss of 
wings ; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the 
meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of 
philosophy, and his " understanding " the measure, 
in all nations, of the English intellect. His coun- 
trymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on 
which they had once walked with echoing steps, and 
disused the studies once so beloved ; the powers of 
thought fell into neglect. The later English want 
the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping 
men in natural classes by an insight of general 
laws, so deep that the rule is deduced with equal 
precision from few subjects, or from one, as from 
multitudes of lives. Shakspeare is supreme in 



232 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

that, as in all the great mental energies. The Ger- 
mans generalize : the English cannot interpret the 
German mind. German science comprehends the 
English. The absence of the faculty in England 
is shown by the timidity which accumnlates moun- 
tains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of 
men and miles of redoubts to compensate the in- 
spirations of courage and conduct. 

The English shrink from a generalization. " They 
do not look abroad into universality, or they draw 
only a bucketful at the fountain of the First Phi- 
losophy for their occasion, and do not go to the 
spring - head." Bacon, who said this, is almost 
unique among his countrymen in that faculty ; at 
least among the prose -writers. Milton, who was 
the stair or high table-land to let down the English 
genius from the summits of Shakspeare, used this 
privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. 
For a long interval afterwards, it is not found. 
Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a 
shorter line ; as his thoughts have less depth, they 
have less compass. Hume's abstractions are not 
deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen ob- 
servation, that no copula had been detected be- 
tween any cause and effect, either in physics or 
in thought; that the term cause and effect was 
loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know 
only as consecutive, not at all as causal. Doctor 



LITERATURE. 233 

Johnson's written abstractions have little value; 
the tone of feeling in them makes their chief worth. 
Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has 
written the history of European literature for three 
centuries, — a performance of great ambition, in- 
asmuch as a judgment was to be attempted on every 
book. But his eye does not reach to the ideal 
standards : the verdicts are all dated from London ; 
all new thought must be cast into the old moulds. 
The expansive element which creates literature is 
steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. 
Hallam is uniformly polite, but with deficient sym- 
pathy ; writes with resolute generosity, but is un- 
conscious of the deep worth which lies in the mys- 
tics, and which often outvalues as a seed of power 
and a source of revolution all the correct writers 
and shining reputations of their day. He passes 
in silence, or dismisses with a kind of contempt, 
the prof ounder masters : a lover of ideas is not only 
uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam inspires 
respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his mani- 
fest love of good books, and he lifts himself to own 
better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, 
and better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. 
But in Hallam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve 
of Mackintosh, one still finds the same type of Eng- 
lish genius. It is wise and rich, but it lives on its 
capital. It is retrospective. How can it discern 



234 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

and hail the new forms that are looming up on the 
horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts which cannot 
dress themselves out of any old wardrobe of the 
past ? 

The essays, the fiction and the poetry of the day 
have the like municipal limits. Dickens, with pre- 
ternatural apprehension of the language of man- 
ners and the varieties of street life ; with pathos 
and laughter, with patriotic and still enlarging 
generosity, writes London tracts. He is a painter 
of English details, like Hogarth ; local and tempo- 
rary in his tints and style, and local in his aims. 
Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional abil- 
ity, is distinguished for his reverence of intellect 
as a temporality, and appeals to the worldly am- 
bition of the student. His romances tend to fan 
these low flames. Their novelists despair of the 
heart. Thackeray finds that God has made no al- 
lowance for the poor thing in his universe, — 
more 's the pity, he thinks, — but 't is not for us 
to be wiser ; we must renounce ideals and accept 
London. 

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone 
of the English governing classes of the day, ex- 
plicitly teaches that good means good to eat, good 
to wear, material commodity; that the glory of 
modern philosophy is its direction on " fruit ; " to 
yield economical inventions ; and that its merit is 



LITERATURE. 235 

to avoid ideas and avoid morals. He thinks it the 
distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy in its 
triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the 
intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, 
and pinning it down to the making a better sick 
chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid ; — this 
not ironically, but in good faith; — that, "solid ad- 
vantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual 
benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of 
astronomy is the better navigation it creates to en- 
able the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and 
wine to the London grocer. It was a curious re- 
sult, in which the civility and religion of England 
for a thousand years ends in denying morals and 
reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan. The critic 
hides his skepticism under the English cant of prac- 
tical. To convince the reason, to touch the con- 
science, is romantic pretension. The fine arts fall 
to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious com- 
modity, does not exist. It is very certain, I may 
say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had been only 
the sensualist his critic pretends, he would never 
have acquired the fame which now entitles him to 
this patronage. It is because he had imagination, 
the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an element 
of contemplation out of all modern English atmos- 
pheric gauges, that he is impressive to the imagina- 
tions of men and has become a potentate not to be 



236 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of 
Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and 
thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific 
gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by an}^ 
tutoring more or less of Newton &c, but as an ef- 
fect of the same cause which showed itself more pro- 
nounced afterwards in Hooke, Boyle and Halley. 

Coleridge, a catholic mind, with a hunger for 
ideas ; with eyes looking before and after to the 
highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke 
the only high criticism in his time, is one of those 
who save England from the reproach of no longer 
possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest 
wit the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of 
his life, his vast attempts but most inadequate per- 
formings, failing to accomplish any one master- 
piece, — seems to mark the closing of an era. Even 
in him, the traditional Englishman was too strong 
for the philosopher, and he fell into accommoda- 
tions ; and as Burke had striven to idealize the 
English State, so Coleridge ' narrowed his mind ' 
in the attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule and 
dogma of the Anglican Church, with eternal ideas. 
But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority 
uttering itself into occasional criticism, oftener in 
private discourse, one would say that in Germany 
and in America is the best mind in England rightly 
respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, 



LITERATURE. 237 

when the Bramins can no longer read or under- 
stand the Braminical philosophy. 

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed 
all this materialism, Carlyle was driven by his dis- 
gust at the pettiness and the cant, into the preach- 
ing of Fate. In comparison with all this rotten- 
ness, any check, any cleansing, though by fire, 
seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little dif- 
ference in the gladiators, or the " causes " for which 
they combated ; the one comfort was, that they 
were all going speedily into the abyss together. 
And his imagination, finding no nutriment in any 
creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic 
beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities of 
mental structure force all minds into a few catego- 
ries ; and where impatience of the tricks of men 
makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the 
negative Deity, the inevitable recoil is to heroism 
or the gallantry of the private heart, which decks 
its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat 
of will against fate. 

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the anno- 
tator of Fourier and the champion of Hahnemann, 
has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a na- 
tive vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, 
equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like 
the armory of the invincible knights of old. There 
is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not 



238 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

known except in deepest waters, and only lacking 
what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest 
centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable 
biases, perhaps the orbit is larger and the return is 
not yet : but a master should inspire a confidence 
that he will adhere to his convictions and give his 
present studies always the same high place. 

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limit- 
ary tone of English thought, and much more easy 
to adduce examples of excellence in particular 
veins ; and if, going out of the region of dogma, we 
pass into that of general culture, there is no end to 
the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility and eru- 
dition of the learned class. But the artificial suc- 
cor which marks all English performance appears 
in letters also : much of their aesthetic production 
is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary rep- 
utations have been achieved by forcible men, whose 
relation to literature was purely accidental, but 
who were driven by tastes and modes they found 
in vogue into their several careers. So, at this mo- 
ment, every ambitious young man studies geology : 
so members of Parliament are made, and church- 
men. 

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has re- 
acted on the national mind. They are incapable of 
an inutility, and respect the five mechanic powers 
even in their song. The voice of their modern 



LITERATURE. 239 

muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, and 
the poem is created as an ornament and finish of 
their monarchy, and by no means as the bird of 
a new morning which forgets the past world in the 
full enjoyment of that which is forming. They are 
with difficulty ideal; they are the most conditioned 
men, as if, having the best conditions, they could 
not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one 
of them is a thousand years old and lives by his 
memory : and when you say this, they accept it as 
praise. 

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, 
travels, statistics, tabulation and engineering ; and 
even what is called philosophy and letters is me- 
chanical in its structure, as if inspiration had 
ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of 
joy, no wisdom, no analogy existed any more. The 
tone of colleges and of scholars and of literary soci- 
ety has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble 
floor, where nothing will grow. They exert every 
variety of talent on the lower ground and may be 
said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost 
all commanding views in literature, philosophy and 
science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of 
three fourths of his mind and confines himself to 
one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of 
labor, and logic ; but a faith in the laws of the 
mind like that of Archimedes ; a belief like that of 



240 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and 
not lead the laws of the mind ; a devotion to the 
theory of politics like that of Hooker and Milton 
and Harrington, the modern English mind repudi- 
ates. 

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since 
they have known how to make it repulsive and be- 
reave nature of its charm ; — though perhaps the 
complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many 
more than to British physicists. The eye of the 
naturalist must have a scope like nature itself, a 
susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart 
as well as to the logic of creation. But English 
science puts humanity to the door. It wants the 
connection which is the test of genius. The sci- 
ence is false by not being poetic. It isolates the 
reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain ; whilst rep- 
tile or mollusk only exists in system, in relation. 
The poet only sees it as an inevitable step in the 
path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit 
finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives 
and dies ignorant of its value. There are great ex- 
ceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas ; perhaps 
of Robert Brown, the botanist ; and of Richard 
Owen, who has imported into Britain the German 
homologies, and enriched science with contributions 
of his own, adding sometimes the divination of the 
old masters to the unbroken power of labor in the 



LITERATURE. 241 

English mind. But for the most part the natural 
science in England is out of its loyal alliance with 
morals, and is as void of imagination and free play 
of thought as conveyancing. It stands in strong 
contrast with the genius of the Germans, those 
semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of 
their height of view, preserve their enthusiasm and 
think for Europe. 

No hope, no sublime augury cheers the student, 
no secure striding from experiment onward to a 
foreseen law, but only a casual clipping here and 
there, like diggers in California " prospecting for a 
placer " that will pay. A horizon of brass of the 
diameter of his umbrella shuts down around his 
senses. Squalid contentment with conventions, sa- 
tire at the names of philosophy and religion, paro- 
chial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, 
betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample 
on nationalities to reproduce London and London- 
ers in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility 
of ideas, of poetry, of religion, — ghosts which they 
cannot lay; and, having attempted to domesticate 
and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broad- 
cloth and gaiters, they are tormented with fear that 
herein lurks a force that will sweep their system 
away. The artists say, " Nature puts them out " ; 
the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry 
earnest speech with banter and levity ; they laugh 

VOL. v. 16 



242 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

you down, or they change the subject. " The fact 
is," say they over their wine, " all that about lib- 
erty, and so forth, is gone by ; it won't do any 
longer." The practical and comfortable oppress 
them with inexorable claims, and the smallest 
fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. 
No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the pre- 
cinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a 
Providence which does not respect English utility. 
The island is a roaring volcano of fate, of material 
values, of tariffs and laws of repression, glutted 
markets and low prices. 

In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure 
love of knowledge and the surrender to nature, 
there is the suppression of the imagination, the pri- 
apism of the senses and the understanding ; we 
have the factitious instead of the natural ; tasteless 
expense, arts of comfort, and the rewarding as an 
illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one im- 
pediment more to interpose between the man and 
his objects. 

Thus poetry is degraded and made ornamental. 
Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round 
frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write with 
out stint? a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland. 
And the libraries of verses they print have this 
Birmingham character. How many volumes of 
well-bred metre we must jingle through, before we 



LITERATURE. 243 

can be filled, taught, renewed ! We want the 
miraculous ; the beauty which we can manufacture 
at no mill, — can give no account of ; the beauty 
of which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. 
The poetry of course is low and prosaic ; only now 
and then, as in Wordsworth, conscientious ; or in 
Byron, passional ; or in Tennyson, factitious. But 
if I should count the poets who have contributed to 
the Bible of existing England sentences of guidance 
and consolation which are still glowing and effect- 
ive, — how few ! Shall I find my heavenly bread 
in the reigning poets ? Where is great design in 
modern English poetry? The English have lost 
sight of the fact that poetry exists to speak the 
spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or 
of fancy is yet essentially new and out of the limits 
of prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore 
the grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded 
their designs, and less considered the finish. It 
was their office to lead to the divine sources, out 
of which all this and much more, readily springs ; 
and, if this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to 
some purpose and we can well afford some staidness 
or hardness, or want of popular tune in the verses. 
The exceptional fact of the period is the genius 
of Wordsworth. He had no master but nature 
and solitude. " He wrote a poem," says Landor, 
" without the aid of war." His verse is the voice 



244 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of canity in a worldly and ambitious age. One re- 
grets that his temperament was not more liquid 
and musical. He has written longer than he was 
inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor. 

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where 
Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear, nor 
more command of the keys of language. Color, 
like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pen- 
cil, in waves so rich that we do not miss the central 
form. Through all his refinements, too, he has 
reached the public, — a certificate of good sense 
and general power, since he who aspires to be the 
English poet must be as large as London, not in 
the same kind as London, but in his own kind. 
But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of 
vision to bring its secrets to the people. He con- 
tents himself with describing the Englishman as he 
is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees 
in poetry and we must be thankful for every beau- 
tiful talent. But it is only a first success, when 
the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets 
has been to show how low and uninspired was their 
general style, and that only once or twice they have 
struck the high chord. 

That expansiveness which is the essence of the 
poetic element, they have not. If was no Oxonian, 
but Hafiz, who said, " Let us be crowned with roses, 
let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old 
roof of heaven into new forms." A stanza of the 



LITERATURE. 245 

song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he 
does not value the salient and curative influence of 
intellectual action, studious of truth without a by- 
end. 

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresisti- 
ble taste for Orientalism in Britain. For a self- 
conceited modish life, made up of trifles, clinging 
to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no 
remedy like the Oriental largeness. That aston- 
ishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once, 
there is thunder it never heard, light it never saw, 
and power which trifles with time and space. I 
am not surprised then to find an Englishman like 
Warren Hastings, who had been struck with the 
grand style of thinking in the Indian writings, 
deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen while 
offering them a translation of the Bhagvat. " Might 
I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds 
to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in 
estimating the merit of such a production, all rules 
drawn from the ancient or modern literature of 
Europe, all references to such sentiments or man- 
ners as are become the standards of propriety for 
opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, 
all appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and 
moral duty." 1 He goes to bespeak indulgence to 
" ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and 
passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into which 

1 Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta. 



246 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

our habits of judgment will find it difficult to pur- 
sue them." 

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies 
in the English race which seems to make any re- 
coil possible ; in other words, there is at all times 
a minority of profound minds existing in the na- 
tion, capable of appreciating every soaring of intel- 
lect and every hint of tendency. While the con- 
structive talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the 
criticism is often in the noblest tone and suggests 
the presence of the invisible gods. I can well be- 
lieve what I have often heard, that there are two 
nations in England ; but it is not the Poor and the 
Rich, nor is it the Normans and Saxons, nor the 
Celt and the Goth. These are each always becom- 
ing the other ; for Robert Owen does not exagger- 
ate the power of circumstance. But the two com- 
plexions, or two styles of mind, — the perceptive 
class, and the practical finality class, — are ever in 
counterpoise, interacting mutually, one in hopeless 
minorities ; the other in huge masses ; one stu- 
dious, contemplative, experimenting ; the other, the 
ungrateful pupil, scornful of the source whilst avail- 
ing itself of the knowledge for gain ; these two na- 
tions, of genius and of animal force, though the 
first consist of only a dozen souls and the second of 
twenty millions, forever by their discord and their 
accord yield the power of the English State. 



CHAPTER XV. 



The power of the newspaper is familiar in Amer- 
ica and in accordance with our political system. 
In England, it stands in antagonism with the feu- 
dal institutions, and it is all the more beneficent 
succor against the secretive tendencies of a mon- 
archy. The celebrated Lord Somers " knew of 
no good law proposed and passed in his time, to 
which the public papers had not directed his at- 
tention." There is no corner and no night. A 
relentless inquisition drags every secret to the day, 
turns the glare of this solar microscope on every 
malfaisance, so as to make the public a more terri- 
ble spy than any foreigner ; and no weakness can 
be taken advantage of by an enemy, since the whole 
people are already forewarned. Thus England 
rids herself of those incrustations which have been 
the ruin of old states. Of course, this inspection is 
feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable mo- 
nopoly, but sees surely that its days are counted ; the 
people are familiarized with the reason of reform, 
and, one by one, take away every argument of the 



248 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

obstructives. " So your grace likes the comfort of 
reading the newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to 
the Duke of Northumberland ; " mark my words ; 
you and I shall not live to see it, but this young 
gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or it may be a little 
later ; but a little sooner or later, these newspapers 
will most assuredly write the dukes of Northum- 
berland out of their titles and possessions, and the 
country out of its king." The tendency in Eng- 
land towards social and political institutions like 
those of America, is inevitable, and the ability of 
its journals is the driving force. 

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men 
who possess the talent of writing off-hand pungent 
paragraphs, expressing with clearness and courage 
their opinion on any person or performance. Val- 
uable or not, it is a skill that is rarely found, out of 
the English journals. The English do this, as they 
write poetry, as they ride and box, by being edu- 
cated to it. Hundreds of clever Praeds and Freres 
and Froudes and Hoods and Hooks and Maginns 
and Mills and Macaulays, make poems, or short 
essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Par- 
liament and on the hustings, or as they shoot and 
ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direc- 
tion of their general ability. Rude health and 
spirits, an Oxford education and the habits of soci- 
ety are implied, but not a ray of genius. It comes 



THE "TIMES." 249 

of the crowded state of the professions, the violent 
interest which all men take in politics, the facility 
of experimenting in the journals, and high pay. 

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the 
" Times " newspaper. No power in England is 
more felt, more feared, or more obeyed. What 
you read in the morning in that journal, you shall 
hear in the evening in all society. It has ears 
everywhere, and its information is earliest, com- 
pletest and surest. It has risen, year by year, and 
victory by victory, to its present authority. I 
asked one of its old contributors whether it had 
once been abler than it is now ? " Never, " he 
said ; " these are its palmiest days. " It has shown 
those qualities which are dear to Englishmen, 
unflinching adherence to its objects, prodigal intel- 
lectual ability and a towering assurance, backed 
by the perfect organization in its printing-house 
and its world-wide network of correspondence and 
reports. It has its own history and famous trophies. 
In 1820, it adopted the cause of Queen Caroline, 
and carried it against the king. It adopted a poor- 
law system, and almost alone lifted it through. 
When Lord Brougham was in power, it decided 
against him, and pulled him down. It declared 
war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted 
the League against the Corn Laws, and, when 
Cobden had begun to despair, it announced his 



250 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

triumph. It denounced and discredited the French 
Republic of 1848, and checked every sympathy 
with it in England, until it had enrolled 200,000 
special constables to watch the Chartists and make 
them ridiculous on the 10th April. It first de- 
nounced and then adopted the new French Empire, 
and urged the French Alliance and its results. It 
has entered into each municipal, literary and social 
question, almost with a controlling voice. It has 
done bold and seasonable service in exposing 
frauds which threatened the commercial commu- 
nity. Meantime, it attacks its rivals by perfecting 
its printing machinery, and will drive them out of 
circulation : for the only limit to the circulation of 
the " Times " is the impossibility of printing copies 
fast enough ; since a daily paper can only be new 
and seasonable for a few hours. It will kill all but 
that paper which is diametrically in opposition ; 
since many papers, first and last, have lived by 
their attacks on the leading journal. 

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the " Times, " 
and had gradually arranged the whole materiel of 
it in perfect system. It is told that when he de- 
manded a small share in the proprietary and was 
refused, he said, " As you please, gentlemen ; and 
you may take away the ' Times ' from this office 
when you will ; I shall publish the 4 New Times, ' 
next Monday morning. " The proprietors, who had 



THE "TIMES:' 251 

already complained that his charges for printing 
were excessive, found that they were in his power, 
and gave him whatever he wished. 

I went one day with a good friend to the " Times" 
office, which was entered through a pretty garden- 
yard in Printing-House Square. We walked with 
some circumspection, as if we were entering a pow- 
der-mill ; but the door was opened by a mild old 
woman, and, by dint of some transmission of cards, 
we were at last conducted into the parlor of Mr. 
Morris, a very gentle person, with no hostile appear- 
ances. The statistics are now quite out of date, 
but I remember he told us that the daily printing- 
was then 35,000 copies ; that on the 1st March, 
1848, the greatest number ever printed, — 54,000 
— were issued ; that, since February, the daily 
circulation had increased by 8000 copies. The 
old press they were then using printed five or six 
thousand sheets per hour ; the new machine, for 
which they were then building an engine, would 
print twelve thousand per hour. Our entertainer 
confided us to a courteous assistant to show us the 
establishment, in which, I think, they employed a 
hundred and twenty men. I remember I saw the 
reporters' room, in which they redact their hasty 
stenographs, but the editor's room, and who is in 
it, I did not see, though I shared the curiosity of 
mankind respecting it. 



252 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The staff of the " Times " lias always been made 
up of able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, 
Barnes, Alsiger, Horace Twiss, Jones Lloyd, John 
Oxenford, Mr. Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contrib- 
uted to its renown in their special departments. 
But it has never wanted the first pens for occa- 
sional assistance. Its private information is inex- 
plicable, and recalls the stories of Fouche's police, 
whose omniscience made it believed that the Em- 
press Josephine must be in his pay. It has mer- 
cantile and political correspondents in every foreign 
cit}^, and its expresses outrun the despatches of the 
government. One hears anecdotes of the rise of 
its servants, as of the functionaries of the India 
House. I was told of the dexterity of one of its 
reporters, who, finding himself, on one occasion, 
where the magistrates had strictly forbidden repor- 
ters, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with 
pencil in one hand and tablet in the other, did his 
work. 

The influence of this journal is a recognized 
power in Europe, and, of course, none is more con- 
scious of it than its conductors. The tone of its 
articles has often been the occasion of comment 
from the official organs of the continental courts, 
and sometimes the ground of diplomatic complaint. 
'What would the "Times" say?' is a terror in 
Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen and in 



THE "TIMES." 253 

Nepaul. Its consummate discretion and success 
exhibit the English skill of combination. The 
daily paper is the work of many hands, chiefly, it 
is said, of young men recently from the University, 
and perhaps reading law in chambers in London. 
Hence the academic elegance and classic allusion 
which adorn its columns. Hence, too, the heat 
and gallantry of its onset. But the steadiness of 
the aim suggests the belief that this fire is directed 
and fed by older engineers ; as if persons of exact 
information, and with settled views of policy, sup- 
plied the writers with the basis of fact and the ob- 
ject to be attained, and availed themselves of their 
younger energy and eloquence to plead the cause. 
Both the council and the executive departments 
gain by this division. Of two men of equal ability, 
the one who does not write but keeps his eye on 
the course of public affairs, will have the higher 
judicial wisdom. But the parts are kept in con- 
cert, all the articles . appear to proceed from a 
single will. The " Times " never disapproves of 
what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology 
for the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of 
him who held the pen. It speaks out bluff and 
bold, and sticks to what it says. It draws from any 
number of learned and skilful contributors ; but 
a more learned and skilful person supervises, cor- 
rects, and co-ordinates. Of this closet, the secret 



254 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

does not transpire. No writer is suffered to claim 
the authorship of any paper; every thing good, 
from whatever quarter, comes out editorially ; and 
thus, by making the paper everything and those 
who write it nothing, the character and the awe of 
the journal gain. 

The English like it for its complete information. 
A statement of fact in the " Times " is as reliable 
as a citation from Hansard. Then they like its 
independence ; they do not know, when they take 
it up, what their paper is going to say : but, above 
all, for the nationality and confidence of its tone. 
It thinks for them all ; it is their understanding 
and day's ideal daguerreotyped. When I see them 
reading its columns, they seem to me becoming 
every moment more British. It has the national 
courage, not rash and petulant, but considerate and 
determined. No dignity or wealth is a shield from 
its assault. It attacks a duke as readily as a po- 
liceman, and with the most provoking airs of con- 
descension. It makes rude work with the Board 
of Admiralty. The Bench of Bishops is still less 
safe. One bishop fares badly for his rapacity, and 
another for his bigotry, and a third for his court- 
liness. It addresses occasionally a hint to Maj- 
esty itself, and sometimes a hint which is taken. 
There is an air of freedom even in their advertis- 
ing columns, which speaks well for England to a 



THE "TIMES." 255 

foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London 
in 1847, I read, among the daily announcements, 
one offering a reward of fifty pounds to any per- 
son who would put a nobleman, described by name 
and title, late a member of Parliament, into any 
county jail in England, he having been convicted 
of obtaining money under false pretences. 

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this 
paper. Every slip of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian 
who writes his first leader assumes that we sub- 
dued the earth before we sat down to write this 
particular " Times." One would think the world 
was on its knees to the " Times " Office for its 
daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calculated. 
Who would care for it, if it " surmised, " or 
u dared to confess," or " ventured to predict," &c ? 
No ; it is so, and so it shall be. 

The morality and patriotism of the " Times " 
claim only to be representative, and by no means 
ideal. It gives the argument, not of the majority, 
but of the commanding class. Its editors know 
better than to defend Russia, or Austria, or Eng- 
lish vested rights, on abstract grounds. But they 
give a voice to the class who at the moment take 
the lead ; and they have an instinct for finding 
where the power now lies, which is eternally shift- 
ing its banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking 
for the class that rules the hour, yet being apprised 



256 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, 
every Church squabble, every strike in the mills, 
they detect the first tremblings of change. They 
watch the hard and bitter struggles of the authors 
of each liberal movement, year by year ; watching 
them only to taunt and obstruct them, — until, at 
last, when they see that these have established 
their fact, that power is on the point of passing to 
them, they strike in with the voice of a monarch, 
astonish those whom they succor as much as those 
whom they desert, and make victory sure. Of 
course the aspirants see that the " Times " is one 
of the goods of fortune, not to be won but by 
winning their cause. 

" Punch " is equally an expression of English 
good sense, as the "London Times." It is the 
comic version of the same sense. Many of its cari- 
catures are equal to the best pamphlets, and will 
convey to the eye in an instant the popular view 
which was taken of each turn of public affairs. Its 
sketches are usually made by masterly hands, and 
sometimes with genius ; the delight of every class, 
because uniformly guided by that taste which is 
tyrannical in England. It is a new trait of the 
nineteenth century, that the wit and humor of Eng- 
land, — as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, 
Dickens, Thackeray, Hood, — have taken the di- 
rection of humanity and freedom. 



THE "TIMES." 257 

The " Times," like every important institution, 
shows the way to a better. It is a living index of 
the colossal British power. Its existence honors 
the people who dare to print all they know, dare to 
know all the facts and do not wish to be flattered 
by hiding the extent of the public disaster. There 
is always safety in valor. I wish I could add that 
this journal aspired to deserve the power it wields, 
by guidance of the public sentiment to the right. 
It is usually pretended, in Parliament and else- 
where, that the English press has a high tone, — 
which it has not. It has an imperial tone, as of a 
powerful and independent nation. But, as with 
other empires, its tone is prone to be official, and 
even officinal. The "Times" shares all the limita- 
tions of the governing classes, and wishes never to 
be in a minority. If only it dared to cleave to the 
right, to show the right to be the only expedient, 
and feed its batteries from the central heart of hu\ 
manity, it might not have so many men of rank 
among its contributors, but genius would be its cor- 
dial and invincible ally ; it might now and then 
bear the brunt of formidable combinations, but no 
journal is ruined by wise courage. It would be the 
natural leader of British reform ; its proud func- 
tion, that of being the voice of Europe, the de- 
fender of the exile and patriot against despots, 
would be more effectually discharged ; it would 

VOL. v. 17 



258 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

have the authority which is claimed for that dream 
of good men not yet come to pass, an International 
Congress ; and the least of its victories would be to 
give to England a new millennium of beneficent 
power. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

STONEHENGE. 

It had been agreed between my friend Mr. Car- 
lyle and me, that before I left England we should 
make an excursion together to Stonehenge, which 
neither of us had seen ; and the project pleased 
my fancy with the double attraction of the monu- 
ment and the companion. It seemed a bringing 
together of extreme points, to visit the oldest re- 
ligious monument in Britain in company with her 
latest thinker, and one whose influence may be 
traced in every contemporary book. I was glad to 
sum up a little my experiences, and to exchange a 
few reasonable words on the aspects of England 
with a man on whose genius I set a very high 
value, and who had as much penetration and as 
severe a theory of duty as any person in it. On 
Friday, 7th July, we took the South Western Rail- 
way through Hampshire to Salisbury, where we 
found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The 
fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of 
Hampshire, in which he is wont to spend a part of 
every summer, made the way short. There was 



260 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

much to say, too, of the travelling Americans and 
their usual objects in London. I thought it natu- 
ral that they should give some time to works of 
art collected here which they cannot find at home, 
and a little to scientific clubs and museums, which, 
at this moment, make London very attractive. But 
my philosopher was not contented. Art and ' high 
art ' is a favorite target for his wit. " Yes, Kunst 
is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted 
a great deal of good time on it : " — and he thinks 
he discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, 
in his later writings, changed his tone. As soon 
as men begin to talk of art, architecture and antiq- 
uities, nothing good comes of it. He wishes to go 
through the British Museum in silence, and thinks 
a sincere man will see something and say nothing. 
In these days, he thought, it would become an ar- 
chitect to consult only the grim necessity, and say, 
4 1 can build you a coffin for such dead persons as 
you are, and for such dead purposes as you have, 
but you shall have no ornament.' For the science, 
he had if possible even less tolerance, and compared 
the savans of Somerset House to the boy who asked 
Confucius " how many stars in the sky ? " Confu- 
cius replied, " he minded things near him : " then 
said the boy, " how many hairs are there in your 
eyebrows ? " Confucius said, " he did n't know and 
didn't care." 



STONEHENGE. 201 

Still speaking of the Americans, Carlyle com- 
plained that they dislike the coldness and exclu- 
siveness of the English, and run away to France 
and go with their countrymen and are amused, in- 
stead of manfully staying in London, and confront- 
ing Englishmen and acquiring their culture, who 
really have much to teach them. 

I told Carlyle that I was easily dazzled, and was 
accustomed to concede readily all that an English- 
man would ask ; I saw everywhere in the country 
proofs of sense and spirit, and success of every 
sort : I like the people ; they are as good as they 
are handsome ; they have everything and can do 
everything ; but meantime, I surely know that as 
soon as I return to Massachusetts I shall lapse at 
once into the feeling, which the geography of 
America inevitably inspires, that we play the game 
with immense advantage ; that there and not here 
is the seat and centre of the British race ; and that 
no skill or activity can long compete with the pro- 
digious natural advantages of that country, in the 
hands of the same race ; and that England, an old 
and exhausted island, must one day be contented, 
like other parents, to be strong only in her chil- 
dren. But this was a proposition which no English- 
man of whatever condition can easily entertain. 

We left the train at Salisbury and took a car- 
riage to Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare, 



262 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

treeless hill, once containing the town which sent 
two members to Parliament, — now, not a hut ; 
and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George 
Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. 
On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a 
house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which 
looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide 
expanse, — Stonehenge and the barrows, which 
rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few 
hayricks. On the top of a mountain, the old tem- 
ple would not be more impressive. Far and wide 
a few shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the 
plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It 
looked as if the wide margin given in this crowded 
isle to this primeval temple were accorded by the 
veneration of the British race to the old egg out of 
which all their ecclesiastical structures and history 
had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade 
with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclosing a 
second and a third colonnade within. We walked 
round the stones and clambered over them, to wont 
ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, 
and found a nook sheltered from the wind among 
them, where Carlyle lighted his cigar. It was 
pleasant to see that just this simplest of all simple 
structures, — two upright stones and a lintel laid 
across, — had long outstood all later churches and 
all history, and were like what is most permanent 



STONEHENGE. 263 

on the face of the planet: these, and the barrows, 
— mere mounds (of which there are a hundred 
and sixty within a circle of three miles about 
Stonehenge), like the same mound on the plain of 
Troy, which still makes good to the passing mari- 
ner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the 
fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure grow but- 
tercups, nettles, and all around, wild thyme, daisy, 
meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle and the carpeting 
grass. Over us, larks were soaring and singing ; — 
as my friend said, " the larks which were hatched 
last year, and the wind which was hatched many 
thousand years ago." We counted and measured 
by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much 
as any man can suddenly know of the inscrutable 
temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there 
were once probably one hundred and sixty. The 
temple is circular and uncovered, and the situation 
fixed astronomically, — the grand entrances, here 
and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, " as 
all the gates of the old cavern temples are." How 
came the stones here ? for these sarsens, or Druid- 
ical sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. 
The sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one 
in all these blocks that can resist the action of fire, 
and as I read in the books, must have been brought 
one hundred and fifty miles. 

On almost every stone we found the marks of the 



264 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

mineralogist's hammer and chisel. The nineteen 
smaller stones of the inner circle are of granite. I, 
who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cam- 
bridge Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was 
ready to maintain that some cleverer elephants or 
mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on 
another. Only the good beasts must have known 
how to cut a well-wrought tenon and mortise, and 
to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The 
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have 
been allowed to settle on so remarkable a monu- 
ment, in a country on which all the muses have 
kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. 
We are not yet too late to learn much more than is 
known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes 
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole 
history, by that exhaustive British sense and per- 
severance, so whimsical in its choice of objects, 
which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to 
the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids and uncovers 
Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity 
of its plan and its good preservation, is as if new 
and recent ; and, a thousand years hence, men will 
thank this age for the accurate history. We walked 
in and out and took again and again a fresh look 
at the uncanny stones. The old sphinx put our 
petty differences of nationality out of sight. To 
these conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike 



STONEHENGE. 265 

known and near. We could equally well revere 
their old British meaning. My philosopher was 
subdued and gentle. In this quiet house of des- 
tiny he happened to say, " I plant cypresses wher- 
ever I go, and if I am in search of pain, I cannot 
go wrong. " The spot, the gray blocks and their 
rude order, which refuses to be disposed of, sug- 
gested to him the flight of ages and the succession 
of religions. The old times of England impress 
Carlyle much : he reads little, he says, in these 
last years, but " Acta Sanctorum ; " the fifty-three 
volumes of which are in the London Library. He 
finds all English history therein. He can see, as 
he reads, the old Saint of Iona sitting there and 
writing, a man to men. The Acta Sanctorum 
show plainly that the men of those times believed 
in God and in the immortality of the soul, as their 
abbeys and cathedrals testify : now, even the puri- 
tanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied 
that greater men had lived in England than any 
of her writers ; and, in fact, about the time when 
those writers appeared, the last of these were 
already gone. 

We left the mound in the twilight, with the 
design to return the next morning, and coming 
back two miles to our inn we were met by little 
showers, and late as it was, men and women were 
out attempting to protect their spread windrows. 



266 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

The grass grows rank and dark in the showery 
England. At the inn, there was only milk for one 
cup of tea. When we called for more, the girl 
brought us three drops. My friend was annoyed, 
who stood for the credit of an English inn, and 
still more the next morning, by the dog-cart, sole 
procurable vehicle, in which we were to be sent 
to Wilton. I engaged the local antiquary, Mr. 
Brown, to go with us to Stonehenge, on our way, 
and show us what he knew of the " astronomical " 
and " sacrificial " stones. I stood on the last, and 
he pointed to the upright, or rather, inclined stone, 
called the " astronomical, " and bade me notice that 
its top ranged with the sky-line. " Yes. " Very 
well. Now, at the summer solstice, the sun rises 
exactly over the top of that stone, and, at the Dru- 
idical temple at Abury, there is also an astronomi- 
cal stone, in the same relative position. 

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to 
science becomes an important clew ; but we were 
content to leave the problem with the rocks. Was 
this the " Giants ' Dance, " which Merlin brought 
from Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon's 
monument to the British nobles whom Hengist 
slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates ? 
or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained 
to King James ; or identical in design and style 
with the East Indian temples of the sun, as Davies 



STONEHENGE. 26 7 

in the Celtic Researches maintains? Of all the 
writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic anti- 
quary, charmed with the geometric perfections of 
his ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments 
and religion of the world, and with the courage of 
his tribe, does not stick to say, "the Deity who 
made the world by the scheme of Stonehenge. " 
He finds that the cursus 1 on Salisbury Plain 
stretches across the downs like a line of latitude 
upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stone- 
henge passes exactly through the middle of this 
cursus. But here is the high point of the theory : 
the Druids had the magnet ; laid their courses by 
it; their cardinal points in Stonehenge, Ambres- 
bury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true 
east and west, followed the variations of the com- 
pass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The name 
of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, and Hercules 
was the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the 
legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god 
gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over 
1 Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cursus. 
The avenue is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 594 
yards in a straight line from the grand entrance, then divid- 
ing into two branches, which lead, severally, to a row of 
barrows, and to the cursus, — an artificially formed flat tract 
of ground. This is half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, 
bounded by banks and ditches, 3036 yards long, by 110 
broad. 



268 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box? 
This cup or little boat, in which the magnet was 
made to float on water and so show the north, was 
probably its first form, before it was suspended on a 
pin. But science was an arcanum, and, as Britain 
was a Phoenician secret, so they kept their compass 
a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian commerce. 
The golden fleece again, of Jason, was the com- 
pass, — a bit of loadstone, easily supposed to be 
the only one in the world, and therefore naturally 
awakening the cupidity and ambition of the young 
heroes of a maritime nation to join in an expedi- 
tion to obtain possession of this wise stone. Hence 
the fable that the ship Argo was loquacious and 
oracular. There is also some curious coincidence 
in the names. Apollodorus makes Magnes the son 
of AUolus, who married Nais. On hints like these, 
Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade into 
historic harmony, and computing backward by the 
known variations of the compass, bravely assigns 
the year 406 before Christ for the date of the 
temple. 

For the difficulty of handling and carrying 
stones of this size, the like is done in all cities, 
every day, with no other aid than horse-power. I 
chanced to see, a year ago, men at work on the 
substructure of a house in Bowdoin Square, in Bos- 
ton, swinging a block of granite of the size of the 



STONEIIENGE. 269 

largest of the Stonehenge columns, with an ordi- 
nary derrick. The men were common masons, with 
paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing 
anything remarkable. I suppose there were as 
good men a thousand years ago. And we wonder 
how Stonehenge was built and forgotten. After 
spending half an hour on the spot, we set forth 
in our dog-cart over the downs for Wilton, Carlyle 
not suppressing some threats and evil omens on 
the proprietors, for keeping 'these broad plains a 
wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of 
English men were hungry and wanted labor. But 
I heard afterwards that it is not an economy to 
cultivate this land, which only yields one crop on 
being broken up, and is then spoiled. 

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall, — the 
renowned seat of the Earls of Pembroke, a house 
known to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent 
home of Sir Philip Sidney, where he wrote the 
Arcadia; where he conversed with Lord Brooke, 
a man of deep thought, and a poet, who caused to 
be engraved on his tombstone, " Here lies Fulke 
Greville, Lord Brooke, the friend of Sir Philip 
Sidney." It is now the property of the Earl of 
Pembroke, and the residence of his brother, Sid- 
ney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble speci- 
men of the English manor-hall. My friend had 
a letter from Mr. Herbert to his housekeeper, and 



270 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

the house was shown. The state drawing-room is 
a double cube, 30 feet high, by 30 feet wide, by 
60 feet long : the adjoining room is a single cube, 
of 30 feet every way. Although these ajDartnients 
and the long library were full of good family por- 
traits, Vandykes and other ; and though there were 
some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full 
of antique and modern statuary, — to which Car- 
lyle, catalogue in hand, did all too much justice, 
— yet the eye was still drawn to the windows, to a 
magnificent lawn, on which grew the finest cedars 
in England. I had not seen more charming 
grounds. We went out, and walked over the 
estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones, 
over a stream of which the gardener did not know 
the name ( Qu. Alph ?) ; watched the deer ; climbed 
to the lonely sculptured summer-house, on a hill 
backed by a wood ; came down into the Italian 
garden and into a French pavilion garnished with 
French busts ; and so again to the house, where 
we found a table laid for us with bread, meats, 
peaches, grapes and wine. 

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for 
Salisbury. The Cathedral, which was finished six 
hundred years ago, has even a spruce and modern 
air, and its spire is the highest in England. I 
know not why, but I had been more struck with 
one of no fame, at Coventry, which rises three 



STONEHENGE. 271 

hundred feet from the ground, with the lightness 
of a mullein plant, and not at all implicated with 
the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the culmi- 
nation of the Gothic art in England, as the but- 
tresses are fully unmasked and honestly detailed 
from the sides of the pile. The interior of the 
Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in the middle, 
acting like a screen. I know not why in real archi- 
tecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is 
so rarely gratified. The rule of art is that a col- 
onnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and that 
ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom 
so long that it need be divided by a screen. 

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, 
whilst service was said. Whilst we listened to the 
organ, my friend remarked, The music is good, and 
yet not quite religious, but somewhat as if a monk 
were panting to some fine Queen of Heaven. Car- 
lyle was unwilling, and we did not ask to have 
the choir shown us, but returned to our inn, after 
seeing another old church of the place. We 
passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could see 
little but the edge of a wood, though Carlyle had 
wished to pay closer attention to the birthplace of 
the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we 
stopped, and found Mr. H., who received us in his 
carriage, and took us to his house at Bishops Wal- 
tham. 



272 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

On Sunday we had much discourse, on a very 
rainy day. My friends asked, whether there were 
any Americans ? — any with an American idea, — 
any theory of the right future of that country? 
Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of cau- 
cuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cab- 
inet-ministers, nor of such as would make of Amer- 
ica another Europe. I thought only of the sim- 
plest and purest minds ; I said, " Certainly yes ; — 
but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which 
I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, 
to which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it 
is the only true." So I opened the dogma of no- 
government and non-resistance, and anticipated the 
objections and the fun, and procured a kind of 
hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never 
seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to 
stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that 
no less valor than this can command my respect. 
I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar mus- 
ket-worship, — though great men be musket-wor- 
shippers ; — and 't is certain as God liveth, the gun 
that does not need another gim, the law of love 
and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. I 
fancied that one or two of my anecdotes made 
some impression on Carlyle, and I insisted that the 
manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibil- 
ity could make no difference to a gentleman ; that 



STONEHENGE. 273 

as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and 
spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might 
quote Talleyrand, "Monsieur, je rfen vois pas la 
necessite." As I had thus taken in the conversa- 
tion the saint's part, when dinner was announced, 
Carlyle refused to go out before me, — " he was al- 
together too wicked." I planted my back against 
the wall, and our host wittily rescued us from the 
dilemma, by saying he was the wickedest and 
would walk out first, then Carlyle followed, and I 
went last. 

On the way to Winchester, whither our host 
accompanied us in the afternoon, my friends asked 
many questions respecting American landscape, for- 
ests, houses, — my house, for example. It is not 
easy to answer these queries well. There, I thought, 
in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, al- 
most conscious, too much by half for man in the 
picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the 
rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at 
night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves ; 
and on it man seems not able to make much im- 
pression. There, in that great sloven continent, 
in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide sky- 
skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides 
the great mother, long since driven away from the 
trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of Eng- 
land. And, in England, I am quite too sensible 

VOL. V. 18 



274 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

of this. Every one is on his good behavior and 
must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put off 
my friends with very inadequate details, as best I 
could. 

Just before entering Winchester we stopped at 
the Church of Saint Cross, and after looking 
through the quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece 
of bread and a draught of beer, which the founder, 
Henry de Blois, in 1136, commanded should be 
given to every one who should ask it at the gate. 
We had both, from the old couple who take care 
of the church. Some twenty people every day, 
they said, make the same demand. This hospital- 
ity of seven hundred years' standing did not hin- 
der Carlyle from pronouncing a malediction on the 
priest who receives £2,000 a year, that were meant 
for the poor, and spends a pittance on this small- 
beer and crumbs. 

In the Cathedral I was gratified, at least by the 
ample dimensions. The length of line exceeds that 
of any other English church ; being 556 feet, by 
250 in breadth of transept. I think I prefer this 
church to all I have seen, except Westminster and 
York. Here was Canute buried, and here Alfred 
the Great was crowned and buried, and here the 
Saxon kings ; and, later, in his own church, Wil- 
liam of Wykeham. It is very old : part of the 
crypt into which we went down and saw the Saxon 



STONEHENGE. 275 

and Norman arches of the old church on which 
the present stands, was built fourteen or fifteen 
hundred years ago. Sharon Turner says, " Alfred 
was buried at Winchester, in the Abbey he had 
founded there, but his remains were removed by 
Henry I. to the new Abbey in the meadows at 
Hyde, on the northern quarter of the city, and laid 
under the high altar. The building was destroyed 
at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred's 
body now lies covered by modern buildings, or bur- 
ied in the ruins of the old." 1 William of Wyke- 
ham's shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and Carlyle 
took hold of the recumbent statue's marble hands 
and patted them affectionately, for he rightly val- 
ues the brave man who built Windsor and this Ca- 
thedral and the School here and New College at 
Oxford. But it was growing late in the afternoon. 
Slowly we left the old house, and parting with our 
host, we took the train for London. 

1 History of the Anglo-Saxons, I. 599. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

PERSONAL. 

In these comments on an old journey, now re- 
vised after seven busy years have much changed 
men and things in England, I have abstained from 
reference to persons, except in the last chapter 
and in one or two cases where the fame of the 
parties seemed to have given the public a property 
in all that concerned them. I must further allow 
myself a few notices, if only as an acknowledg- 
ment of debts that cannot be paid. My journeys 
were cheered by so much kindness from new 
friends, that my impression of the island is bright 
with agreeable memories both of public societies 
and of households : and, what is nowhere better 
found than in England, a cultivated person fitly 
surrounded by a happy home, "with honor, love, 
obedience, troops of friends," is of all institutions 
the best. At the landing in Liverpool I found 
my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gen- 
tleman whose kind reception was followed by a 
train of friendly and effective attentions which 
never rested whilst I remained in the country. A 



PERSONAL. 277 

man of sense and of letters, the editor of a power- 
ful local journal, he added to solid virtues an infi- 
nite sweetness and bonhommie. There seemed a 
pool of honey about his heart which lubricated 
all his speech and action with fine jets of mead. 
An equal good fortune attended many later acci- 
dents of my journey, until the sincerity of English 
kindness ceased to surprise. My visit fell in the 
fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was the Ameri- 
can Minister in London, and at his house, or 
through his good offices, I had easy access to ex- 
cellent persons and to privileged places. At the 
house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in 
society and in letters. The privileges of the 
Athenseum and of the Reform Clubs were hospi- 
tably opened to me, and I found much advantage 
in the circles of the " Geologic," the " Antiqua- 
rian " and the " Royal " Societies. Every day in 
London gave me new opportunities of meeting 
men and women who give splendor to society. I 
saw Rogers, Hallam, Macaulay, Mimes, Milman, 
Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, 
Leigh Hunt, D'Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey, 
Kenyon and Forster : the younger poets, Clough, 
Arnold and Patmore ; and among the men of 
science, Robert Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday, 
Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker, Carpenter, 
Babbage and Edward Forbes. It was my privi- 



278 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

lege also to converse with Miss Baillie, with Lady 
Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson and Mrs. Somerville. 
A finer hospitality made many private houses not 
less known and dear. It is not in distinguished 
circles that wisdom and elevated characters are 
usually found, or, if found, they are not confined 
thereto ; and my recollections of the best hours go 
back to private conversations in different parts of 
the kingdom, with persons little known. Nor am 
I insensible to the courtesy which frankly opened 
to me some noble mansions, if I do not adorn my 
page with their names. Among the privileges of 
London, I recall with pleasure two or three signal 
days, one at Kew, where Sir William Hooker 
showed me all the riches of the vast botanic gar- 
den ; one at the Museum, where Sir Charles Fel- 
lowes explained in detail the history of his Ionic 
trophy-monument ; and still another, on which Mr. 
Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and 
myself through the Hunterian Museum. 

The like frank hospitality, bent on real service, 
I found among the great and the humble, wherever 
I went ; in Birmingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, 
in Nottingham, in Sheffield, in Manchester, in 
Liverpool. At Edinburgh, through the kindness 
of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the acquaintance of 
De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson, of Mrs. 
Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of 



PERSONAL. 279 

high character and genius, the short-lived painter, 
David Scott. 

At Ambleside in March, 1848, I was for a 
couple of days the guest of Miss Martineau, then 
newly returned from her Egyptian tour. On Sun- 
day afternoon I accompanied her to Rydal Mount. 
And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth, 
many years before, I must not forget this second 
interview. We found Mr. Wordsworth asleep on 
the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, as 
an old man suddenly waked before he had ended 
his nap ; but soon became full of talk on the French 
news. He was nationally bitter on the French ; 
bitter on Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said, 
can write English. He detailed the two models, on 
one or the other of which all the sentences of the 
historian Robertson are framed. Nor could Jef- 
frey, nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write English, 
nor can * * *, who is a pest to the English tongue. 
Incidentally he added, Gibbon cannot write Eng- 
lish. The Edinburgh Review wrote what would 
tell and what would sell. It had however changed 
the tone of its literary criticism from the time when 
a certain letter was written to the editor by Cole- 
ridge. Mrs. W. had the Editor's answer in her 
possession. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic gen- 
ius, though with some affectation. He had thought 
an elder brother of Tennyson at first the better 



280 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one. . . . 
In speaking of I know not what style, lie said, " to 
be sure, it was the manner, but then you know the 
matter always comes out of the manner." . . . He 
thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for 
a great capital city. . . . We talked of English 
national character. I told him it was not credit- 
able that no one in all the country knew anything 
of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in every 
American library his translations are found. I 
said, if Plato's Republic were published in England 
as a new book to-day, do you think it would find 
any readers ? — he confessed, it would not : " And 
yet," he added after a pause, with that compla- 
cency which never deserts a true-born Englishman, 
" and yet we have embodied it all." 

His opinions of French, English, Irish and 
Scotch, seemed rashly formulized from little anec- 
dotes of what had befallen himself and members 
of his family, in a diligence or stage-coach. His 
face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation 
was not marked by special force or elevation. Yet 
perhaps it is a high compliment to the cultivation 
of the English generally, when we find such a man 
not distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a 
weather-beaten face, his face corrugated, especially 
the large nose. 

Miss Martineau, who lived near him, praised 



PERSONAL. 281 

him to me not for his poetry, but for thrift and 
economy ; for having afforded to his country-neigh- 
bors an example of a modest household where com- 
fort and culture were secured without any display. 
She said that in his early housekeeping at the cot- 
tage where he first lived, he was accustomed to 
offer his friends bread and plainest fare ; if they 
wanted anything more, they must pay him for their 
board. It was the rule of the house. I replied 
that it evinced English pluck more than any anec- 
dote I knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood 
told the story of Walter Scott's staying once for 
a week with Wordsworth, and slipping out every 
day, under pretence of a walk, to the Swan Inn 
for a cold cut and porter ; and one day passing 
with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by the 
landlord's asking him if he had come for his por- 
ter. Of course this trait would have another look 
in London, and there you will hear from different 
literary men that Wordsworth had no personal 
friend, that he was not amiable, that he was par- 
simonious, &c. Landor, always generous, says that 
he never praised any body. A gentleman in Lon- 
don showed me a watch that once belonged to Mil- 
ton, whose initials are engraved on its face. He 
said he once showed this to Wordsworth, who took 
it in one hand, then drew out his own watch and 
held it up with the other, before the company, but 



282 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

no one making the expected remark, he put back 
his own in silence. I do not attach much impor- 
tance to the disparagement of Wordsworth among 
London scholars. Who reads him well will know 
that in following the strong bent of his genius, he 
was careless of the many, careless of the few, self- 
assured that he should " create the taste by which 
he is to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to wit- 
ness the revolution he had wrought, and "to see 
what he foresaw." There are torpid places in his 
mind, there is something hard and sterile in his 
poetry, want of grace and variety, want of due cath- 
olicity and cosmopolitan scope: he had conformi- 
ties to English politics and traditions ; he had ego- 
tistic puerilities in the choice and treatment of his 
subjects ; but let us say of him that, alone in his 
time, he treated the human mind well, and with an 
absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic creed 
rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortal- 
ity is the high-water-mark which the intellect has 
reached in this age. New means were employed, 
and new realms added to the empire of the muse, 
by his courage. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

RESULT. 

England is the best of actual nations. It is no 
ideal framework, it is an old pile built in different 
ages, with repairs, additions and makeshifts; but 
you see the poor best you have got. London is 
the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. 
Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand 
in solid phalanx foursquare to the points of com- 
pass ; they constitute the modern world, they have 
earned their vantage ground and held it through 
ages of adverse possession. They are well marked 
and differing from other leading races. England 
is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is 
not so public in its bias ; private life is its place of 
honor. Truth in private life, untruth in public, 
marks these home-loving men. Their political 
conduct is not decided by general views, but by 
internal intrigues and personal and family interest. 
They cannot readily see beyond England. The 
history of Rome and Greece, when written by their 
scholars, degenerates into English party pamphlets. 
They cannot see beyond England, nor in England 



284 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

can they transcend the interests of the governing 
classes. " English principles " mean a primary re- 
gard to the interests of property. England, Scot- 
land and Ireland combine to check the colonies. 
England and Scotland combine to check Irish 
manufactures and trade. England rallies at home 
to check Scotland. In England, the strong classes 
check the weaker. In the home population of near 
thirty millions, there are but one million voters. 
The Church punishes dissent, punishes education. 
Down to a late day, marriages performed by dis- 
senters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives 
power to those who are rich enough to buy a law, 
The game-laws are a proverb of oppression. Pau- 
perism incrusts and clogs the state, and in hard 
times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the por- 
ridge was diluted. Multitudes lived miserably by 
shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities, the children are 
trained to beg, until they shall be old enough to 
rob. Men and women were convicted of poisoning 
scores of children for burial-fees. In Irish districts, 
men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, 
the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and 
brutal form. During the Australian emigration, 
multitudes were rejected by the commissioners as 
being too emaciated for useful colonists. During 
the Russian war, few of those that offered as 
recruits were found up to the medical standard, 
though it had been reduced. 



RESULT. 285 

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious 
and lavish of money, has not often been generous 
or just. It has a principal regard to the interest 
of trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias 
of the ambassador, which usually puts him in sym- 
pathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned 
the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, 
Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome and Hungary. 

Some public regards they have. They have 
abolished slavery in the West Indies and put an 
end to human sacrifices in the East. At home 
they have a certain statute hospitality. England 
keeps open doors, as a trading country must, to all 
nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and wrath- 
f ully supported by their laws in unbroken sequence 
for a thousand years. In Magna Charta it was 
ordained that all " merchants shall have safe and 
secure conduct to go out and come into England, 
and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as 
by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed 
customs, without any evil toll, except in time of 
war, or when they shall be of any nation at war 
with us. " It is a statute and obliged hospitality 
and peremptorily maintained. But this shop-rule 
had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold 
unalterable courtesy to political exiles of every 
opinion, and is a fact which might give additional 
light to that portion of the planet seen from the 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 

farthest star. But this perfunctory hospitality puts 
no sweetness into their unaccommodating manners, 
no check on that puissant nationality which makes 
their existence incompatible with all that is not 
English. 

What we must say about a nation is a superfi- 
cial dealing with symptoms. We cannot go deep 
enough into the biography of the spirit who never 
throws himself entire into one hero, but delegates 
his energy in parts or spasms to vicious and defec- 
tive individuals. But the wealth of the source is 
seen in the plenitude of English nature. What va- 
riety of power and talent ; what facility and plen- 
teousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, 
loyalty ; what a proud chivalry is indicated in 
" Collins's Peerage," through eight hundred years ! 
What dignity resting on what reality and stout- 
ness ! What courage in war, what sinew in labor, 
what cunning workmen, what inventors and en- 
gineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks and 
scholars ! No one man and no few men can repre- 
sent them. It is a people of myriad personalities. 
Their many-headedness is owing to the advanta- 
geous position of the middle class, who are always 
the source of letters and science. Hence the vast 
plenty of their aesthetic production. As they are 
many-headed, so they are many-nationed : their col- 
onization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and 



RESULT. 287 

their speech seems destined to be the universal lan- 
guage of men. I have noted the reserve of power 
in the English temperament. In the island, they 
never let out all the length of the reins, there is no 
Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of will 
or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the time of 
Mahomet, or like that which intoxicated France in 
1789. But who would see the uncoiling of that 
tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-hus- 
banded forces, must follow the swarms which pour- 
ing now for two hundred years from the British is- 
lands, have sailed and rode and traded and planted 
through all climates, mainly following the belt of 
empire, the temperate zones, carrying the Saxon 
seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts 
and for thought, — acquiring under some skies a 
more electric energy than the native air allows, — 
to the conquest of the globe. Their colonial pol- 
icy, obeying the necessities of a vast empire, has 
become liberal. Canada and Australia have been 
contented with substantial independence. They 
are expiating the wrongs of India by benefits; 
first, in works for the irrigation of the peninsula, 
and roads, and telegraphs; and secondly, in the 
instruction of the people, to qualify them for self- 
government, when the British power shall be finally 
called home. 

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, 



288 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

— a divine cripple like Vulcan; a blind savant 
like Huber and Sanderson. They do not occupy 
themselves on matters of general and lasting im- 
port, but on a corporeal civilization, on goods that 
perish in the using. But they read with good in- 
tent, and what they learn they incarnate. The 
English mind turns every abstraction it can receive 
into a portable utensil, or a working institution. 
Such is their tenacity and such their practical turn, 
that they hold all they gain. Hence we say that 
only the English race can be trusted with freedom, 

— freedom which is double-edged and dangerous 
to any but the wise and robust. The English de- 
signate the kingdoms emulous of free institutions, 
as the sentimental nations. Their culture is not 
an outside varnish, but is thorough and secular in 
families and the race. They are oppressive with 
their temperament, and all the more that they are 
refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with 
my countrymen when I was forced to allow them 
every advantage, and their companions seemed bags 
of bones. 

There is cramp limitation in their habit of 
thought, sleepy routine, and a tortoise's instinct 
to hold hard to the ground with his claws, lest he 
should be thrown on his back. There is a drag of 
inertia which resists reform in every shape ; — law- 
reform, army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish 



RESULT. 289 

franchise, Catholic emancipation, — the abolition of 
slavery, of impressment, penal code and entails. 
They praise this drag, nnder the formula that it 
is the excellence of the British constitution that no 
law can anticipate the public opinion. These poor 
tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings 
sprouting at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine 
warms at their heart and waits a happier hour. It 
hides in their sturdy will. " Will," said the old 
philosophy, " is the measure of power," and per- 
sonality is the token of this race. Quid vult valde 
mdt. What they do they do with a will. You 
cannot account for their success by their Christian- 
ity, commerce, character, common law, Parliament, 
or letters, but by the contumacious sharptongued 
energy of English naturel, with a poise impossible 
to disturb, which makes all these its instruments. 
They are slow and reticent, and are like a dull good 
horse which lets every nag pass him, but with whip 
and spur will run down every racer in the field. 
They are right in their feeling, though wrong in 
their speculation. 

The feudal system survives in the steep in- 
equality of property and privilege, in the limited 
franchise, in the social barriers which confine pa- 
tronage and promotion to a caste, and still more in 
the submissive ideas pervading these people. The 
fagging of the schools is repeated in the social 

VOL. v. 19 



290 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to those 
below him in the social scale, as he looks for none 
from those above him ; any forbearance from his 
superiors surprises him, and they suffer in his good 
opinion. But the feudal system can be seen with 
less pain on large historical grounds. It was 
pleaded in mitigation of the rotten borough, that 
it worked well, that substantial justice was done. 
Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, 
Romilly, or whatever national man, were by this 
means sent to Parliament, when their return by 
large constituencies would have been doubtful. So 
now we say that the right measures of England are 
the men it bred ; that it has yielded more able men 
in five hundred years than any other nation ; and, 
though we must not play Providence and balance 
the chances of producing ten great men against the 
comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospec- 
tively, we may strike the balance and prefer one 
Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, 
one Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish 
democrats. 

The American system is more democratic, more 
humane ; yet the American people do not yield 
better or more able men, or more inventions or 
books or benefits than the English. Congress is 
not wiser or better than Parliament. France has 
abolished its suffocating old rSgime, but is not re- 
cently marked by any more wisdom or virtue. 



RESULT. 291 

The power of performance has not been ex- 
ceeded, — the creation of value. The English 
have given importance to individuals, a principal 
end and fruit of every society. Every man is 
allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is 
guarded in the indulgence of his whim. " Magna 
Charta," said Rushworth, "is such a fellow that he 
will have no sovereign." By this general activity 
and by this sacredness of individuals, they have in 
seven hundred years evolved the principles of free- 
dom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages and 
bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged 
should wash it away, it will be remembered as an 
island famous for immortal laws, for the announce- 
ments of original right which make the stone tables 
of liberty. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 

A few days after my arrival at Manchester, in 
November, 1847, the Manchester Athenaeum gave 
its annual Banquet in the Free-Trade Hall. With 
other guests, I was invited to be present and to 
address the company. In looking over recently a 
newspaper-report of my remarks, I incline to re- 
print it, as fitly expressing the feeling with which 
I entered England, and which agrees well enough 
with the more deliberate results of better acquaint- 
ance recorded in the foregoing pages. Sir Archi- 
bald Alison, the historian, presided, and opened the 
meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr. 
Cobden, Lord Brackley and others, among whom 
was Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to 
"Punch." Mr. Dickens's letter of apology for 
his absence was read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been 
announced, did not appear. On being introduced 
to the meeting I said : — 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: It is pleasant 
to me to meet this great and brilliant company, 
and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so many 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 293 

distinguished persons on this platform. But I 
have known all these persons already. When I 
was at home, they were as near to me as they are 
to you. The arguments of the League and its 
leader are known to all the friends of free trade. 
The gayeties and genius, the political, the social, 
the parietal wit of " Punch " go duly every fort- 
night to every boy and girl in Boston and New 
York. Sir, when I came to sea, I found the " His- 
tory of Europe " 1 on the ship's cabin table, the 
property of the captain ; — a sort of programme or 
play-bill to tell the seafaring New Englander what 
he shall find on his landing here. And as for 
Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to 
print on, where it is not found ; no man who can 
read, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he 
finds some charitable pair of eyes that can, and 
hears it. 

But these things are not for me to say; these 
compliments, though true, would better come from 
one who felt and understood these merits more. I 
am not here to exchange civilities with you, but 
rather to speak of that which I am sure interests 
these gentlemen more than their own praises ; of 
that which is good in holidays and working-days, 
the same in one century and in another century. 
That which lures a solitary American in the woods 

1 By Sir A. Alison. 



294 ENGLISH TRAITS. 

with the wish to see England, is the moral pecu- 
liarity of the Saxon race, — its commanding sense 
of right and wrong, the love and devotion to that, 

— this is the imperial trait, which arms them with 
the sceptre of the globe. It is this which lies at 
the foundation of that aristocratic character, which 
certainly wanders into strange vagaries, so that its 
origin is often lost sight of, but which, if it should 
lose this, would find itself paralyzed ; and in trade 
and in the merchant's shop, gives that honesty 
in performance, that thoroughness and solidity 
of work which is a national characteristic. This 
conscience is one element, and the other is that 
loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that hom- 
age of man to man, running through all classes, 

— the electing of worthy persons to a certain fra- 
ternity, to acts of kindness and warm and staunch 
support, from year to year, from youth to age, — 
which is alike lovely and honorable to those who 
render and those who receive it ; which stands in 
strong contrast with the superficial attachments of 
other races, their excessive courtesy and short-lived 
connection. 

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but 
holiday though it be, I have not the smallest inter- 
est in any holiday except as it celebrates real and 
not pretended joys ; and I think it just, in this 
time of gloom and commercial disaster, of affliction 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 295 

and beggary in these districts, that, on these very 
accounts I speak of, you should not fail to keep 
your literary anniversary. I seem to hear you say, 
that for all that is come and gone yet, we will not 
reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the braveries 
of our annual feast. For I must tell you, I was 
given to understand in my childhood that the Brit- 
ish island from which my forefathers came was no 
lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses 
and music and merriment all the year round, no, 
but a cold, foggy, mournful country, where nothing 
grew well in the open air but robust men and vir- 
tuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and 
endurance ; that their best parts were slowly re- 
vealed ; their virtues did not come out until they 
quarrelled ; they did not strike twelve the first 
time ; good lovers, good haters, and you could 
know little about them till you had seen them long, 
and little good of them till you had seen them in 
action; that in prosperity they are moody and 
dumpish, but in adversity they were grand. Is it 
not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not praise 
the ship parting with flying colors from the port, 
but only that brave sailer which came back with 
torn sheets and battered sides, stript of her ban- 
ners, but having ridden out the storm? And so, 
gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, 
with the possessions, honors and trophies, and 



296 EXGLISFT TRAITS. 

also with the infirmities of a thousand years gath- 
ering around her, irretrievably committed as she 
now is to many old customs which cannot be sud- 
denly changed ; pressed upon by the transitions of 
trade and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, 
arts, machines and competing populations. I see 
her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering 
that she has seen dark days before ; — indeed with 
a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a 
cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calam- 
ity she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. 
I see her in her old age, not decrepit, but young 
and still daring to believe in her power of endur- 
ance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail ! 
mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength 
still equal to the time ; still wise to entertain and 
swift to execute the policy which the mind and 
heart of mankind requires in the present hour, and 
thus only hospitable to the foreigner and truly a 
home to the thoughtful and generous who are born 
in the soil. So be it ! so let it be ! If it be not so, 
if the courage of England goes with the chances of 
a commercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of 
Massachusetts and my own Indian stream, and say 
to my countrymen, the old race are all gone, and 
the elasticity and hope of mankind must hence- 
forth remain on the Alleghany ranges, or no- 
where. 

„9 4 



